Natalya Voskresenskaya Blog

Thing that should or should not be done to SharePoint admin account

Natalya.Voskresenskaya — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 00:58:24 GMT

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 :-)

Technorati Tags: SharePoing administrator,Farm administrator account

Shared Services Provider app pool

Natalya.Voskresenskaya — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 00:39:08 GMT

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.

Technorati Tags: SSP application pool,sharepoint,IIS

Customizing SharePoint with third party applications

Natalya.Voskresenskaya — Sat, 29 Nov 2008 20:41:03 GMT

Technorati Tags: Sharepoint,third party applications

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.

http://searchsystemschannel.techtarget.com/tip/0,289483,sid99_gci1338980,00.html#

Are you smarter than a 6th grader? (continued)

Natalya.Voskresenskaya — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 13:37:24 GMT

Congratulations to all the winners:

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

Are you smarter than a 6th grader?

Natalya.Voskresenskaya — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 16:15:16 GMT

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.

Free learning resources for SharePoint

Natalya.Voskresenskaya — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 15:14:10 GMT

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!

Technorati Tags: Free training,sharepoint development training

Moss SP1 upgrade

Natalya.Voskresenskaya — Sun, 12 Oct 2008 17:05:06 GMT

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

MVP Squirrel

Natalya.Voskresenskaya — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 20:08:07 GMT

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.

Technorati Tags: SharePoint MVP,MVP award

Set default date to first day of the current month

Natalya.Voskresenskaya — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 16:01:15 GMT

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

Technorati Tags: Sharepoint,date calculation

SharePoint Best Practices Conference

Natalya.Voskresenskaya — Sun, 07 Sep 2008 22:41:08 GMT

Technorati Tags: SharePoint Best Practices Conference,SharePoint,training

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.