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Here is a short list of most common scenarios that people should be aware of regarding SP admin account on AD: 1. When the account initially is created, set "Password never expires" account property to true. This is not a regular user account hence it should comply with service account settings rules. If the password changes, reset passwords to reflect the new password in the Application pool identity. 2. If you are not happy with you "spappadmin" or "spadmin" (fill in the blanks) farm admin account name, DO NOT DELETE IT AND CREATE NEW ONE with the desired name. just rename this account in AD, this will make sure that the SID remains the same and the security settings do not have to be recreated for this account EVERYWHERE. this applies to any other account in AD, but admins do know it. 3. if your farm admin account without password change suddenly looses connection to the DB and in the log you see account "[blank]" could not be authenticated to the SQL. most likely your account got corrupted in AD. Another scenario, Farm is still functioning fine, but when you try to connect to the SQL remotely using farm admin account connection fails. You will still be able to access you farm since the trusted connection had been established before the AD account got corrupted, but you will not be able to establish any new connections with it. In this case just recreate admin account in AD and go through the pain of recreating security settings or changing SIDs. Enjoy :-)
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When you create Shared Services provider in your SharePoint Farm and want to assign already existing app pool make sure that the name of this application pool is exactly the same as SSP name. If the name is not the same then Sharepoint will create new app pool with SSP name even though the new SSP will use the app pool that you assign to it. Why I think it's important is the amount of app pools will directly impact the performance of system. Just examine you IIS and delete this unused app. pool.
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Solution provider takeaway: Advise your clients on how to choose among the proliferation of third-party products available for customizing SharePoint. As a powerful tool with document management capabilities and workflows that automate manual processes, Windows SharePoint Services has become the platform that many companies turn to as a solution for changing business needs. SharePoint also provides a foundation for building Web-based business applications that can easily scale to meet business growth. As a result, there are a plethora of third-party suppliers of custom SharePoint products. In some cases, these third-party applications and add-ons add flexibility or more functionality to the basic feature set offered by SharePoint, and in others they enable powerful administrative capabilities and allow integration with critical business applications and databases. read more http://searchsystemschannel.techtarget.com/tip/0,289483,sid99_gci1338980,00.html#
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Congratulations to all the winners: David Welker jabs Pedro Caligari Ula U Pedro Miguel vera73 Thank you all for your participation, You are smarter than 6th grader or maybe on the same level :-)... just kidding. You all got it right! Some of you were impatient to get the correct answer so I'm doing this post a bit earlier than I should. All of you that are interested in the answer to the problem that I posted yesterday, click on the following link and read comments. http://spforsquirrels.blogspot.com/2008/11/are-you-vera73-than-6th-grader.html Enjoy
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Try your problem solving skills. Here is the problem I was presented with at the SharePoint Connections 2007. For some reason SharePoint folks did not want to hang out with me, so I've found myself in the company of "SQL Geeks" ... SQL is my OTHER favorite thing... So here is the thing, one of the SQL gurus tells me the "problem" he had to solve at his job placement interview, he also specifically mentioned that the problem might not have a solution, it is just a way to explore your way of thinking. Here it is: 1. you have 8 balls. all of them are of the same weight, but one. 2. you do not know if this one ball is heavier or lighter then the others 3. you have the scale to measure the weight of these balls, but you can measure it only 3 times. 
I'm opening the competition for all of you to tell me the right answer. Send you ideas in form of comments. The reason why I want to post it is that I've given this problem to my 11 year old son, who in turn was trying to get away from dong his extra curriculum activities (like vocabulary enhancement). To make the story short he solved this problem in 1 hour!!!!!! Hellooooooo, in ONE hour. it took me the whole flight from Orlando to New York to even overcome the fact that this "problem" might have a solution. Try your self out, I'll post the solution next week.
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This following site is worth checking out. Especially for some of you that want to take their SharePoint skills set to the next level. It provides "Program Guide" and even "Graduation" :-) My favorite part about free online training resources is the self paced learning approach that allows you to make your training class available anywhere the Internet is. http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/rampup/default.aspx Enjoy!
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After installing binary for WSS SP1 and MOSS SP1 and running Configuration Wizard I’ve received Upgrade failed message on step 6 of 9. Event log had shown Eventid 104 and 100. Inspection of Services had shown that the Timer service has been stopped after trying to restart it "logon failure" was thrown, resetting the identity of this service back to farm admin account has resulted in the successful start of this service. I rerun Configuration Wizard now step 8 of 9 "fails to start SPSearch Service Instance, start it manually" and it followed by the same failure to upgrade message. Further inspecting logs revealed that search could not start due to logon failure as well. What solved it all was resetting WSS Search to farm admin account explicitly and rerunning Config Wizard. I’m not exactly sure why it had to be done so, this was a development environment the was in fairly healthy state and all services had been running under the same farm admin account. The logon failure messages did not make much since since all services were running fine before the upgrade. But it worked. Time to upgrade the production environment, oh.. almost forgot … Infrastructure Updates time Technorati Tags: Service Pack 1. Enjoy
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My dear squirrels readers, I was happy to learn yesterday that I have been awarded the Microsoft MVP (Most Valuable Professional) award. It's an honor to join the SharePoint MVP team and get in contact with best of the best in the SharePoint community.
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This is small requirement I received to make a date column in a list and make it to default to the first day of the current month. I'm sure that for most of you it will not be something difficult to do, but for those struggling here are the steps: 1. create a date type column. 2. In the default value of this column to the following formula =DATE(YEAR(Today),MONTH(Today),DAY("1-Apr-2008")) instead of "1-Apr-2008" you might want to use any date that reflects the first day of the month, DAY() function will extract the needed number 1. Enjoy
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I'll be at the SharePoint Best Practices Conference in Washington September 15-17. I'll be co-presenting at this even with my colleague Paul Galvin on Tuesday the 16th: Real World Governance: "Taming the Wild West " As well as presenting at my very first session on Wednesday 17th: "Formula for Success" - Training your SharePoint Staff This session will cover all roles and role based training approach. This presentation will cover:
- Identification of the key roles involved in the usage/development/maintenance of the SharePoint Portal
- Describe the type of training each role is required to receive based on their responsibilities
- How to deliver more focused and relevant training Audience members should gain enough understanding of the importance of delivering training to all roles involved in a successfully SharePoint implementation, and with concrete and useful information that help them to develop the right training strategy. Stop by and say "hi" :-) I'll see you there.
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I've just realized that my article had already been published on TechTarget "SharePoint Training". Let me make something clear, I am not a trainer, the reason I've chosen "training" topic is because in my experience the biggest obstacle in end-user adoption is lack of competence and general basic knowledge of the SharePoint environment and it's functionality. This can be addressed through delivering right training. Take a look at this article, hopefully it will help you to define and customize your training a well as explain different delivery methods.
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So what is it and how does it help to have a secondary workflow? To better depict the picture I'll start with the following scenario: there is a complicated document management system with many approval workflows etc. one of many workflows is triggered by a document upload, the workflow type is determined by some of the metadata of the document. when an approval task is created by "collect data from user" action in the SPD workflow creation, the approval task should indicate the type of the document and some additional metadata of the document such as if approval of the document is urgent, due date for the approval, etc. (you finish the list :-) All of this information is indicated by end-user during the document metadata input. But... when the task is created the next step of the workflow is not executed until user completes the task, even if I put "update item" action in the next step to update metadata of the task with document's metadata, it will do so only after the task is completed, which completely defeats the purpose of this step. Secondary workflow to the rescue….. When you create a workflow on the tasks list and start it on item creation. You will update the metadata of this task with the metadata of the document and reference the document by using "Tasks:Workflow Item ID" In the long run as soon as the task gets created it will update itself with the document metadata by finding the doc based on the following criteria "document library: ID" = "tasks: workflow Item ID" This is applicable in any scenario where you want to reference the item that originated the workflow that had created the task.
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As part of the ISPA board, I'm pleased to announce launch of ISPA web site, it can be viewed at: http://sharepointpros.org ISPA had been operational for sometime already, but without any web presence it was much harder to get our message across and reach disparate Sharepoint communities all around the world. You can read about ISPA and it's mission in the following news release. The International SharePoint Professionals Association, also known as ‘ISPA’, is an independent, not-for-profit, community-driven organization dedicated to support SharePoint professionals and groups all around the world. The primary mission of ISPA is to promote the global adoption of SharePoint Technologies by providing support and guidance to the SharePoint community as a whole - by establishing connections between SharePoint professionals, groups, resources, education and information. ISPA is led and supported by volunteers across the world, and will focus on bringing the entire SharePoint community closer together. ISPA’s first offering to the community is support to user groups around the world through free WSS v3 web sites for any group that becomes ISPA-affiliated. In addition, one of the goals of ISPA is to facilitate an exchange of ideas between user group leaders that helps increase the likelihood of their group’s success. Therefore, ISPA is providing leaders of user groups with access to collaborative spaces where they can interact with other user group leaders, sharing ideas, resources, best practices, guidance, and most importantly - support for one another. ISPA has also established Regional Evangelists - existing community leaders who have previously exhibited a strong commitment to the promotion of the SharePoint community, and who have pledged to carry the ISPA message throughout their particular region. These evangelists are key local contacts who are available to work with local SharePoint professionals and user groups throughout their region to help promote the community and SharePoint. If you are interested in starting a user group, have an existing one, or need guidance - the ISPA Regional Evangelists are great resources who are available immediately to assist you. Finally, as everyone knows, no community is complete without a web site, and ISPA is proud to announce the launch of its official site, http://www.sharepointpros.org. While the web site is still in the early stages of development, plans for multilingual support and exciting functionality that will assist anyone involved with SharePoint are on the horizon. If you have ideas for ISPA, would like to start a user group, or are looking for assistance, visit the new ISPA web site or contact ISPA at contactus@sharepointpros.org. Together, as the community we can achieve what was impossible as individuals - become a part of ISPA today!"
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Over time I've heard this request coming in several times, so this is the time to share my idea on how to make it happen. so far I've found this the easiest and quickest way. I'll talk about trade offs at the end. This technique involves a couple of steps: 1. Add Content Editor Web part anywhere on your Portal home page, this web part will not be visible to end users, this is why placement does not matter. 2. Edit content of this Web Part through the HTML editor option available in the WP. 3. Paste the following script in there <script type="text/javascript"> var start = document.cookie.indexOf( "MyPortalHome=" ); if (start < 0) {
document.cookie = "MyPortalHome=Something";
document.location.href="[my desired url]";
} </script> 4. Replace [my desired url] with the url of your alternative home page 5. Save you changes :-) Lets see what the script does: var start = document.cookie.indexOf( "MyPortalHome=" ); This way we are checking for existence of the "MyPortalHome" cookie by setting "start" variable to the index location of the "MyPortalHome" cookie. if (start < 0) { if the cookie exists "start" variable will be more than -1, it will represent the actual start position of the cookie, if it is -1 then the cookie does not exist, meaning this is the firsts time user clicked on the portal url within this browser session. if this is the case we will execute the code below.
document.cookie = "MyPortalHome=Something"; We are setting the cookie document.location.href="[my desired url]"; And redirecting users to the alternative Home Page. If the cookie exists we are doing nothing. It will indicate that user got to this page before. T he cookie will expire as soon as the user closes the browser, next time the user goes to the portal url the cookie will be set again and they will get redirected to the alt. home page. Gotchas: 1. if the user opens a new tab in IE and goes to the portal home, the cookie will persist and they will not get redirected, only when the browser is closed the cookie will expire with the end of the session. 2. To set the cookie in the browser you will have to allow to execute the script, you can prevent this behavior by modifying your security settings for this zone, or add this site to a list of trusted sites. Have fun
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I was very excited to have an opportunity to write an article on the SharePoint implementation approach best practice topic for TechTarget. Unfortunately due to article's length limitation which I absolutely agree with (who has time to read lengthy article) I had to be very concise, but I’ve tried at least to mention the most important points. The biggest challenge though is initial light weight approach to the SharePoint implementation project by the client. Most of the time companies view SharePoint as just another application to get their hands on. They do not understand that it is a platform which implementation demands a careful planing and design. Hopefully this message will get through to them and we will have to spend less time justifying the cost of the discovery and initial design phase and more time on building the most flexible and reliable platform. Here is the link to the article http://searchsystemschannel.techtarget.com/tip/0,289483,sid99_gci1317689,00.html
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