Archive for July, 2010
Modify the default scope for your search box
Posted by sharepoinTony on July 28, 2010
Posted in Search, SharePoint 2007 | Tagged: Search, Tips and Tricks | 1 Comment »
Email Enabling a Document Library
Posted by sharepoinTony on July 23, 2010
There are many reasons why you might want to e-mail enable a Document Library in SharePoint. One of them could be simply because some manager doesn’t want to navigate to the library to upload a file. Another, better reason is because they are traveling and want to post a document on your Intranet without having to VPN into your network. Regardless of the reason, the steps to make this happen are easy so let’s get started.
Step 1 – Know what you want
Do you want the documents to all go into the root library or into folders?
Do you want anyone in the world to post files to this library?
Will your e-mail system allow incoming email to route to SharePoint?
I will assume you get those questions answered and are ready to go now.
Step 2 – Navigate to the Document Library you want to e-mail enable.
I will use “Shared Documents” for this example.
Step 3 – Select Settings > Document Library Settings
Step 4 – Select Incoming email settings from the Communications section of the Library Settings page
Step 5 – Enable Incoming e-mail
- Allow the document library to receive e-mail – yep, that is why we are here.
- Enter an e-mail name for users to send files to this library. You may want to use some form of the document library name. Since this is a test run for me, I used ‘test’.
Note that the full email address contains “@sharepointserver” dot your company domain. This is something you may have to ensure your e-mail system will allow. You also may have to setup a specific e-mail box and use that address here to allow it to work. See the references at the end of this post.
- Select the appropriate options for E-Mail Message, and Meeting Invitations (if you are not sure just say No, it is likely the best option).
- Read the Caution under E-Mail Security and set the E-mail security policy.
Step 6 – Click OK and test your e-mail setup
Step 7 – You are done, el’ fine!
REFERENCES:
Planning for Incoming E-Mail: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc263260.aspx
Reference this article for details on configuring your SharePoint SMTP services: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc262947.aspx
Posted in Install and Configure, SharePoint 2007 | Tagged: Document Library, email | Leave a Comment »
Moving MOSS 2007 SQL Databases part 3
Posted by sharepoinTony on July 27, 2010
If you haven’t seen the earlier posts on this topic: Part 1 and Part 2
D-Day has arrived, it is time to actually move my SharePoint 2007 sql databases to a different SQL Server. My previous posts touched on the research I did leading up to this event. This post will cover the actual tasks and outcome. I am writing this as I go through the process, so let’s all cross our fingers that it goes smooth.
My Plans
A summary of my plan is as follows:
Round 1
I attempted these steps and all went smoothly until I got to step 13 – Restore SSP’s from backup. The restore made it to 50 percent complete then ran into this error:
After several attempts and a grueling session of troubleshooting I found that the SQL Server Agent was not running on my ‘new’ SQL server (SQL Server 2008 R2 64-bit, running on Windows Server 2008 64-bit). The fun part was that I couldn’t get it to start. The Agent would just stop after every attempt to start it. I tried several solutions found on-line, none of which worked.
At this point my weekend was over and we needed the production server back online, so I did the restore BACK to the original SQL Server. SharePoint was up and running fine very quickly.
Finally, I un-installed SQL Server 2008 R2 from the new server and started over. After carefully reinstalling SQL Server 2008 R2 I no longer had any problem with the SQL Server Agent. Hurray, now will the SSP restore work? I have to wait until the next weekend to find out.
Round 2
Friday – A week has gone by and I am now preparing to walk through all of those steps again. More confident than last time perhaps, but concerned at what I might run into this time around. I will do all of the initial steps – the backups – tonight, Friday night. Saturday morning I will start the scary part, removing the SSP’s and moving everything to the new SQL Server.
Saturday – Everything went well up to the restore, again. This time the error was an Access Denied error pointing to the SharePoint backup directory. Short-story resolution: change the SQL Server account to use a Domain account, make sure that domain account had permissions to the backup folder and to the sql database files folder. I also wanted to make sure I didn’t have any more trouble getting to the backup folder so I opened it up (temporarily) to several other accounts – my ssp and app-pool users.
The SSP Restore completed successfully, with zero errors and zero warnings. Hurray!
Hold-on, the process outlined by Microsoft ends here. What about my content databases?
Searching about I found that I need to use stsadm to detach the content databases, one by one, from the SharePoint server and add the databases on the new server. So I begin this task and have no problems until I get to the Config database. It detaches fine, but then the services become disabled and the attach (setconfigdb) results in “Value cannot be null. Parameter name: str” ! What the?! Time for Microsoft Support calls.
Support helped resolve the ‘migration’ issues, however now the SSP is not working-including search, and there are several other things missing. I am told I will have to add any solutions back in, and find whatever features or web parts that might not work and fix them. Also have to open a new ticket for ‘advanced troubleshooting’ on the SSP. It has been a long Saturday.
Round 3
Sunday – Monday (ouch)
After hours on the phone and several rounds of running psconfig we were able to get a new Config db setup and restore over it to capture most of my configuration data. The SSP is a different story. We had to create a new SSP, which left me with a few more days of reconfiguring the SSP, Search, Audiences, etc. before I was “back” to normal.
Wrap-up
Posted in Commentary, Install and Configure, SharePoint 2007 | Tagged: SQL | 2 Comments »