Dirk Van den Berghe SharePoint Admin Blog

Step-by-Step – A REAL world upgrade of a SharePoint Portal Server 2003 (SPS) farm to Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 (MOSS) by Cornelius J van Dyk

Looking for some more information about the gradual upgrade from SPS 2003 to MOSS 2007 I stumbled upon this monster step-by-step guide of Cornelius J van Dyk, a Microsoft MVP in SharePoint. If you are starting an upgrade project, then be sure to go through this document!

You can find the document and the post at http://www.cjvandyk.com/blog/Lists/Posts/Post.aspx?ID=107

And be sure to add Cornelius' Blog to your favourite feeds!

And if for some weird reason you are reading this Cornelius, GREAT JOB on your blog! You just got an additional fan!

almost MCITP Enterprise Messaging Administrator. 2/3 exams completed

Yes!

One more exam to go to complete the track for achieving the MCITP Enterprise Messaging Administrator exam track based on Exchange 2007.

You need to pass the following exams:

Prerequisite MCTS certification   
Exam 70-236: TS: Exchange Server 2007, Configuring
 
Professional Series exams  
Exam 70-237: PRO: Designing Messaging Solutions with Microsoft Exchange Server 2007
Exam 70-238: PRO: Deploying Messaging Solutions with Microsoft Exchange Server 2007

I only need to find time to prepare for the 70-238 exam. Concerning the other exams I can tell you that the 70-236 exam has a lot of questions regarding the powershell scripting for Exchange and the 70-239 exam is all about where to put which Exchange roles.

Replace SQL 2000 database server hosting your SPS 2003 (and MCMS 2002) databases with SQL 2005

Hello again,

It is been a while since I posted something, but hey, there's more to life than working

I am currently working on a SharePoint migration project that requires migrating SharePoint Portal Server 2003 to MOSS 2007. Within this project there is also a need to replace the SQL 2000 backend with SQL 2005. Apparently the In-place upgrade has already been tried before and keeps failing, so I was asked if detaching the databases from SQL 2000, restaging the servers and install with SQL 2005 and attaching the databases would do the trick.

Well it did do the trick! On top of that the SPS 2003 servers were also running Content Management Server 2002 using the same SQL server.

This is what I did (in a lab environment):

Download zipped list items - codeplex project by Marijn Somers

 Mohamed Zaki has created a great Codexplex project:Sharepoint Download Zipped List Items

What it does is create an extra button on your "Actions" menu in your libraries, where you can choose to zip documents in this library:
- zip all items
- zip all items with versions
- zip all items in current view
- zip all items in current view with version


Just tested it out and it works great! Versions of documents are just placed with an (X.x) tag in the name.

I do think this one is really useful!
Few comments though:
- it also appears on lists..where you cant zip anything..
- the icon also doesn't look very good..kinda pixelated..

I believe that if you are using SharePoint to put documents on (as a collaboration environment), you should install this! It adds a lot of functionality to your platform.


 

Display SQL Data on a SharePoint site

Had this question today from my good friend Cedric. He needed a way to display non-SharePoint SQL data on a SharePoint site. Well, looking around on the net I found these options:

Visio Stencils for SharePoint 2007 Site Structures documentation (by Maxime Bombardier and Mart Muller)

Please have a look at Maxime Bombardier's Blog  on MSDN Blogs for his article on Visio Stencils for SharePoint 2007. You can download them directly from his blog and is a great addition if you are busy documenting SharePoint sites and structures. His stencil is for SharePoint objects such as sites, document libraries, site collections, surveys, etc. Maxime also has a link in his article for a stencil that with SharePoint Servers for documenting SharePoint architectures. This stencil can be found on the Blog of Mart Muller here

For your convenience I have downloaded the files to my blogsite here:

MOSS_servers.zip

MOSS_Site_Structure_v0.2.zip

Of Course check the blogs of Maxime and Mart for updates

How to display Visio file in SharePoint web part by Elton

Just talked with my colleague Marijn Somers about viewing documents directly on SharePoint sites, when this came up. I remember having done this before for displaying infrastructure Visio drawings on the homesite of the Infrastructure Team SharePoint site using the trick below. I thought to put it on my blog as well (don't know why I didn't before, but....) 

So here it is. I found it in an article on Elton's Ark MSDN blog

I have an idea recently that I want our project web site could display Office Visio file and Office Project .mpp file.

Visio attract me very much for its powerful diagram elements, it could centralize my thinking in a diagram and it is so easy understanding and abstractive in every phase of project life cycle.

For .mpp file I want to replace normal list web part with gantt diagram. Normally we maintain a task list in SharePoint account for the project schedule, but I'd rather to use project file to plan and monitor the project status, because task list is not straitforward for task dependency and task hierarchy, but gantt diagram is a good choice to me.

I found a method to display visio file in SharePoint web part and I don't know if it is the only solution or not now.

Visio 2003 Viwer active-x control must be installed in client machine even if it has office 2003 installed, before client user browse the sharepoint web page containing visio web part (I don't like this, but in vain). This active-x control is an add-in of IE to display visio diagram. It could be found at http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=3FB3BD5C-FED1-46CF-BD53-DA23635AB2DF&displaylang=en.

In SharePoint you could drag & drop a Content Editor web part onto a web part page, then click "Source Editor" button to imput following:

<OBJECT classid="CLSID:279D6C9A-652E-4833-BEFC-312CA8887857"
codebase="http://download.microsoft.com/download/4/5/2/452f8090-413f-408f-83c0-edd66db786ee/vviewer.exe"
id="viewer1" width="100%" height="100">
<param name="BackColor" value="16777120">
<param name="AlertsEnabled" value="1">
<param name="ContextMenuEnabled" value="1">
<param name="GridVisible" value="0">
<param name="HighQualityRender" value="1">
<param name="PageColor" value="16777215">
<param name="PageVisible" value="1">
<param name="PropertyDialogEnabled" value="1">
<param name="ScrollbarsVisible" value="1">
<param name="ToolbarVisible" value="1">
<param name="SRC" value="http://wssxxxx/Shared%20Documents/Yukon%20Timeline.vsd">
<param name="CurrentPageIndex" value="0">
<param name="Zoom" value="-1">
</object>

Red color string indicates the visio file's location in SharePoint. Other parameters could be set according to its effect in IE visio viewer.

The result doesn't meet my idea completely, anyway it is a solution for displaying the visio file in SharePoint.

Useful link: http://www.wssdemo.com/Pages/visio.aspx?menu=Articles.

Save Adobe Acrobat documents to SharePoint using Save As... directly in Adobe

Ever wanted to save your documents directly into a SharePoint document library as you would for saving the document to a local folder or network share from within your Acrobat software? Well apparently, when you try to save a newly created pdf file, you cannot browse to a SharePoint site.

The Adobe website does offer you a solution to do that exactly. They allow you to install a free DMS Integration Plug-in for Acrobat from Omtool, called the SwiftWriter Plugin for Adobe

This plugin will give you the following option in Acrobat:

I just went through the Adobe website for the new Adobe Acrobat 9 Family products and there is some mentionning of built-in SharePoint integration into the new versions. I downloaded a trial to check this out, but the new version still will not enable you to save directly to SharePoint without the plugin.

What it does allo you to do is use a SharePoint Workspace for reviewing comments:

Forms Based Authentication ( FBA) in WSS 3.0 / MOSS 2007 (by MeySun)

I had an issue this week that I was unable to sign in to my personal WSS site. for some reason the popup login screen never showed. I know that my company laptop is heavily secured as well as the network. So if it was a firewall blocking or my IE settings that did not allow the logon, I didn't care. All I needed was being able to logon to my site.

This brought me to the idea of implementing FBA for my site. I didn't want to manage users in a SQL database etc. I just needed FBA to authenticato to Active Directory. I stumbled upon a great blog post by meysun (aka Meyyappan Meenakshisundaram).

Here is what he wrote:

1. Configure SharePoint Central Admin 

• Login to SharePoint Central Admin
• Go to Application Management / Application Security / Authentication Providers and Change the Web Application to the one which needs to be configured for Forms Based Authentication
• Click zone / default, change authentication type to forms and enter ActiveDirectoryMembershipProvider under membership provider name ( for example , "ADMembershipProvider") and save this change
  

2.Update the web.config of SharePoint Central admin site
 

under <configuration> node

<connectionStrings>
<add name="ADConnectionString" connectionString="LDAP://DynamicsAX.local/CN=Users,DC=DynamicsAX,DC=local" />
</connectionStrings>

under <system.web> node

<membership defaultProvider="ADMembershipProvider">
<providers>
<add name="ADMembershipProvider"
type="System.Web.Security.ActiveDirectoryMembershipProvider,System.Web,Version=2.0.0.0,Culture=neutral,PublicKeyToken=b03f5f7f11d50a3a" connectionStringName="ADConnectionString"
connectionUsername="xxx" connectionPassword="yyy"
enableSearchMethods="true"
attributeMapUsername="sAMAccountName"/>
</providers>
</membership>

replace the connectionstring to the one matching your encvironment and replace"xxx" with domainname\username and "yyy" with password

3.Update the web.config of SharePoint Web application

•  Repeat step 2 for the web.config of the SharePoint webapplication to be configured for Forms Based Authentication
•  Change the authentication in web.config to
  <authentication mode="Forms">
      <forms loginUrl="/_layouts/login.aspx"></forms>
  </authentication>

For more details
http://technet2.microsoft.com/Office/en-us/library/23b837d1-15d9-4621-aa0b-9ce3f1c7153e1033.mspx?mfr=true
http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms998360.aspx

So, Thanks meysun for your post. It really helped me out !

Certification MCITP Windows Server 2008 Enterprise Administrator achieved

Yesterday, I finally passed the last exam towards the MCITP Enterprise Administrator certification with a score of 947 / 1000. The exam had multiple choice 48 questions. No simulations.
This concludes my upgrade of my MCSA and MCSE on Windows Server 2003 towards Windows Server 2008

I can finally concentrate fully on SharePoint again

For the logo freaks:

This certificate brings up my total to 2 MCSA's, 2MCSE's, 5 MCTS's and 2 MCITP's

According to Microsoft there are currently 5961 MCITP Enterprise Admins and 3338 MCITP Server Admins worldwide (stats dated Spetember 22nd) 

How To backup and Restore your SSP (by Jonathan Martiat)

My colleague, Jonathan Martiat, was busy today investigating different ways to backup and/or restore your SSP. He has written a bullet-proof step-by-step article, that has been tested thoroughly on his blog. You can find the article here

So please go and look at this this article and absorbe the knowledge

Find a memory leak application on SharePoint

If you're going to look for memory leaks, you need Performance Monitor (perfmon).

Here is a method you can use to detect memory leaks:

First open Perfmon and select the .NET CLR Memory Performance object and the counter # Bytes in all Heaps for all your w3wp instances (w3wp#1, w3wp#2, etc).

With these counters you will be able to see if any w3wp process is accumulating memory. Leave this running for some hours and you will notice rapidly.

Now once you have determined a w3wp process that is leaking, you need to clearly identify it. Of course the w3wp#1 notation, isn't helping here. So you need to find out what does it correspond to. In my previous post, I already mentionned that you can find out the Web Application if you have the Process ID. Clearly, in this case, we still need to find the process ID.

I have come across 2 methods for this:

1. You can set a registry key on your server(s) that will translate the w3wp#1 into w3wp_pid. See KB281884 for this (I hate setting registry keys if it can also be done without )

2. You can also find out this information using perfmon! Add the Performance object Process with the counter ID Process and for the instance of w3wp#... for which you want to know the pid. And voila, you get the Pid. 

Now, using cscript iisapp.vbs you can find out the Web application that is leaking. With this information you can then check which solutions are deployed to this web application and you can already start with the fingerpointing !

I want to thank my good friend and colleague Cedric Carrette for sharing this information with me.

How to find out which w3wp.exe is mapped to which Application pool

Looking at the processes of one of my servers, I notices a huge memory consumption on one of the w3wp.exe's running on the Moss server. Immediately I wanted to find out which SharePoint Webapp is causing this. And there I was..... Well you need to know the Process ID first (View -> Select Columns... in Task Manager) and then you can use the iisapp.vbs tool that comes with IIS.

I found this information on the this post from the Thoughts about IIS (and now SharePoint blog) which describes the following:

During the course of working through issues, I get asked at least twice a week how to determine which application pool maps to a particular worker process PID (Process ID) on a server.  I suppose there are lots of ways to determine this, but here two that come to mind to determine the answer.

The first way, and by far the easiest, is to use one of the new scripts that come in the box called IISAPP.VBS.  It is located in the %SystemRoot%\system32 directory.  For example:

As you can see, this script makes it very easy to determine what the PID is of each specific Application Pool.  This is nice to use when trying to determine which PID you may want to snap a dump of for debugging purposes.

Certification MCTS Windows Vista, Configuration achieved

I know, it is becoming a little bit boring, but I passed the 70-620 exam tuesday and got another MCTS in the pocket. I liked this exam because of the simulations. I had never seen these kind of questions before where you are presented with a desktop and are asked to either configure something on the system or troubleshoot something. The exam had 64 questions of which 5 simulations.

For the logo freaks:

Next week I will take my final exam: MCITP Enterprise Administrator. After that I will stop a while, unless I am asked to by my boss af course....

Certification MCITP Windows Server 2008, Server Administrator achieved

I am on a roll these last week regarding my certification updates. yesterday I pased the exam 70-646 PRO Windows Server 2008, Server Administrator with a score of 981 /1000. The exam had 44 questions.

This exam gave me the MCITP Server Administrator certificate.

Nice thing to now, only about 2800 people currently have this certificate worldwide !

Next up: 2 exams. Configuring Vista and the MCITP Enterprise Administrator exam....