Relocation

I have moved my blog to a SharePoint Foundation 2010 hosted site.  Seems to make sense, doesn’t it?

Please update your RSS Feed, Links or other connections to my blog to http://sharepointony.info/blog for continuing updates.

tony

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Moving OneNote between SharePoint environments

If you who have discovered the benefits of using OneNote shared notebooks AND have sync’d the notebook in a SharePoint library…this post is for you.

We started using OneNote 2010 with our MOSS 2007 farm, and because of the kind of shop we are – we setup a new SharePoint 2010 environment to run beside our MOSS farm.  Fast forward to January 2012 and our SP2010 environment is our ‘production’ intranet now.  Our MOSS environment is still chugging along and we are going to keep her for a while, but how we use that farm has changed significantly over time.

Now that our SP2010 farm is heavily used, we don’t like that we still have a shared OneNote notebook lingering out there in the old MOSS environment.   We do have other OneNote notebooks out there, but they are old, smelly notebooks that we don’t really use.  We keep them because they are now an archive of specific notes.

There is one notebook however that is still alive with activity, so we just want it ‘where we are’.  We have a better home for that notebook.  One that we visit daily and where we have other related content.  So it was an easy decision to move the notebook from the MOSS library to the shiny SharePoint 2010 library where it belongs.

OK enough of the back-story.  Down to the nitty gritty…

To move your OneNote 2010 notebook

1. Open the SP2007 library in Explorer
2. Open the SP2010 library in Explorer View
3. Guess the next step….yep drag the OneNote folder from one to the other
   • yes, you can copy and paste -or- cut and paste if you prefer that to being a bully by using ‘drag’ method

Whew! That was tough.  WAIT, there is more!

Notify the people sharing that notebook of the new location, they will have to ‘change location’ to sync to the notebook.  Here are the arduous steps:

1. Right-click the NoteBook
2. Select Properties
3. Click the Change Location button
4. Click the address bar and type or paste in the URL to the new document library
5. Click the Select button

I chose to send folks these steps as part of the message that the notebook was now in it’s new home.

We now return you to your regularly scheduled SharePoint blog browsing.   Happy Notes.

2011 in review

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2011 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

The concert hall at the Syndey Opera House holds 2,700 people. This blog was viewed about 25,000 times in 2011. If it were a concert at Sydney Opera House, it would take about 9 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.

Click here to see the complete report.

2010 in review

The stats helper monkeys at WordPress.com mulled over how this blog did in 2010, and here’s a high level summary of its overall blog health:

The Blog-Health-o-Meter™ reads Wow.

Crunchy numbers

The average container ship can carry about 4,500 containers. This blog was viewed about 14,000 times in 2010. If each view were a shipping container, your blog would have filled about 3 fully loaded ships.

In 2010, there were 33 new posts, growing the total archive of this blog to 84 posts. There were 5 pictures uploaded, taking up a total of 306kb.

The busiest day of the year was January 6th with 153 views. The most popular post that day was Calendar Reminder (Part 2).

Where did they come from?

The top referring sites in 2010 were google.com, community.sharepointproconnections.com, sharepointproconnections.com, twitter.com, and google.co.in.

Some visitors came searching, mostly for sharepoint calendar reminder, sharepoint calendar reminder email, sharepoint calendar reminders, sharepoint calendar alerts, and moss 2007 file size limit.

Attractions in 2010

These are the posts and pages that got the most views in 2010.

1

Calendar Reminder (Part 2) April 2009
80 comments

2

“Conference” Room Manager for SharePoint June 2009
10 comments

3

Poor Folk’s Calendar Reminder (part 1) April 2009
2 comments

4

MOSS 2007 size limits – and List Item Attachments June 2009
2 comments

5

Fab 40 Help Desk Template screen shots November 2009

Odd Profile Import from AD

I am running a clean install of MOSS 2007 SP2 on Windows Server 2008 R2, all patches/updates etc. have been applied (this was not an upgraded SP2003 server).

I have the following User Filter in place for the import from our Active Directory:

(&(objectCategory=Person)(objectClass=User)(!(userAccountControl:1.2.840.113556.1.4.803:=2))(!(!company=*)))

This should be filtering such that I import only people with the account type of User, which are not disabled, and do not have a blank value listed in Company.

What I get: SOME disabled accounts are imported into the User Profiles and appear in the User Information list, while others are not.

This is happening AFTER 3 or more Full Imports have run since the time the user accounts were disabled in AD.  All of the accounts are ‘disabled’ the same way in AD, right-click and choose disable. Looknig at the menu via right-click on the account displays “enable” and looking at the properties shows that the accounts are disabled.

After searching and trying various things I did find one very interesting thing.  When the import is run using the domain administrator account rather than my SharePoint service account (which has read access to the AD) then all of the disabled accounts filter properly.  When I switch back and do a full import, then the rogue disabled accounts return to Active.  It is always the same accounts that do not filter and the same disabled accounts that do filter regardless of the user who runs the import.

There must be some kind of permission thing going on here, and I am still testing but this seems like an odd behavior that may have as its source Active Directory.  Updates to follow, if I ever find the final answer.

Epilogue to Calendar Reminder

The Calendar Reminder (Part 2) post has been the most viewed post on my blog over the past year.  There have been a few weeks where other posts surfaced as number 1, but when I review the stats for the past 12 months, the calendar post is certainly the most popular.    There is obvious interest in this topic.

Since the time of the original post, I have had several other calendar related requests and from them I have pulled one feature that might be of particular interest to those of you who found the Calendar Reminder post useful.  This is a twist on the reminder, but certainly related.

How would you like your SharePoint Calendar event email reminder to include a link to create an Outlook event for the user?

Here is how to accomplish this using SharePoint 2007

Requirements

1. A SharePoint calendar
2. A workflow associated with that calendar

Steps to add a link to add the event to the users Outlook calendar in the email they receive from SharePoint.

1. Create (or go to) the event in the SharePoint calendar
2. Open the event (view) and Right-Click on the Export Event link, Copy the link
3. Jump over to SharePoint Designer, open the workflow for the SharePoint Calendar where the event resides
4. In your email (or the variable used to create the message text) add in an html anchor tag and paste in the link you copied in step 2
5. Find the “ID=” portion of the link, remove the id number and insert a lookup – use the <Add Lookup> button
6. Select the ID of the current item for your lookup (this way the link works for any item created in this calendar)
7. Don’t forget to add the quotes and end tag syntax to your anchor – see example below:

If you would like to add this event to your Outlook calendar, <a href=”http://webappname/sites/sitename/_vti_bin/owssvr.dll?CS=109&Cmd=Display&List={ec72e475-45aa-4f06-83e0-855ec9ca94d4}&CacheControl=1&ID=[%Calendar:ID%]&Using=event.ics“>CLICK HERE</a>, then click to Open, then click Save & Close in the Outlook calendar item.

This example provides both the Outlook calendar item and instructions on how to use it.  Notice that the portion highlighted above should contain the link you copied with the ID removed.  The link must come from your server and the specific SharePoint Calendar that you are providing to the Outlook item.

Perhaps you would rather not create such a complex workflow as the Calendar Reminder posts provide.  If want to just send an email at the time of the event creation that included the ability to add the event to the Outlook calendar – you can simplify the workflow to notify the recipients and include the above link.   This allows the user to create their own reminder using Outlook!

I want to point out that this idea originated (for me) with Laura Rogers 2009 post entitled “Appointment email Link, via SPD workflow“.  Thanks and kudos to Laura for sharing the idea and steps with the SharePoint community.

Restricting Site Templates

I had a group come to me recently that wanted to set up a subsite to their site and allow a group of users create sites under that subsite.  Standard issue for SharePoint.  In this case they wanted those sites to all start out the same.  They had specific things such as two document libraries and a few other specific lists as the default when those sites get created.   Also standard issue for SharePoint…by simply creating a site template the users to select they would get what they wanted.

This request didn’t specifically ask for the restriction of site templates, however since we have had numerous other similar requests we now have a lot of site templates available.  So…

To make everyone’s life a little easier I decided to restrict the subsites so the users could only use the template created for them.  The group manager was very happy-this made it very simple for them to find and thus the creation of their sites was a snap.

The trick to it all is getting to the Page Layout and Site Template Settings page.  This isn’t available to you at the Site level, it is only on the Site Settings menu at the Site Collection level (top-level site).  That doesn’t mean you can’t use it to accomplish this task.

After creating the desired site template, go to the site above (parent to) the site where you want the users restricted to specific templates.  Replace the aspx page portion of the url with

_layouts/areatemplatesettings.aspx

Make your adjustments to the site templates available to subsites in the Page Layout and Site Template Settings screen, then click OK.

Modify the default scope for your search box

MOSS/SharePoint 2007

To modify the default scope

Go to your home page and navigate to “Site Actions” –> “Site Settings” –> “Modify All Site Settings“.

On this page, pick “Search scopes” under the Site Collection Administration.

Here you’ll see some different “Display groups“, one of them is the “Search Dropdown” (which is the search box you see on your SharePoint site).

If you click on the “Search Dropdown” link, you’ll be taken to a page with some settings for this group and the bottom one is where you set your default scope.

Modify this to whatever you want, click OK and you’re done!

Moving MOSS 2007 SQL Databases part 3

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:

1. Backup the SharePoint farm
2. Backup all SQL db’s
3. Move those backups off to a “safe” spot on the network.
4. Start the process defined in the TechNet article Move all databases (Office SharePoint Server 2007)
5. Backup the SSP’s
6. Remove SSP’s
7. Stop the Farm (services)
8. Backup sql db’s
9. Copy backups to new sql server
10. Restore sql db’s on new sql server
11. Apply roles, permissions, etc. to new sql server & restored db’s
12. Restart Farm
13. Restore SSP’s from backup
14. Cross-fingers and check to see that our SharePoint intranet is up and running
15. Go have a beer

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:

SqlException: Timeout expired.  The timeout period elapsed prior to completion of the operation or the server is not responding.

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

Some good came from this pain… since I had to reconfigure the SSP I could apply some lessons learned since the original install.  Now I feel like my SSP is “better” than it was before. 😉   I improved our Search features, including a federated search we were using, I cleaned up some Audiences that were not used, etc.   I just had to find some improvements!

Email Enabling a Document Library

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

1. Allow the document library to receive e-mail – yep, that is why we are here.
2. 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.

1. 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).
2. 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