I was playing with the list of sites commands and seeing the output on the command line in xml format. It’s a lot of info on the command screen and difficult to interpret.

So I tried

stsadm -o enumsites -url http://mywebapp.domain.com > sitelist.xml

I then just opened up the xml file with excel2007. (really beginning to like the features in this version)
It warned that there was not an associated schema, would I like to create on from the file, ‘yes Please’!

And now I have great spreadsheet where I can sort, filter, sum, etc.

The first trick is that the groups need to be ‘email enabled security groups’. Distribution lists do not show up in the people picker.

The second trick, and the one that is not documented is that you will need to explicitly add the group that you intend to email to a permission group in the site collection, site, or list, etc…
Basically wherever you have your permissions defined for the content you are alerting on. The basic viewers or visitors groups will suffice.
N.B. I would still recommend adding users explicitly by user account to the members group of a site so that the site will show in their membership webpart of their mysite.

Now just create the alert as you would conventionally from the ‘Alert Me’ item on the action menu of the list or library.

In the ‘Send Alerts To’ item remove your own name from the list and add in the group name. Make sure you select the options correctly! After the alert is created an email will be sent to the group announcing that they have been subscribed to an alert.

Now please be a considerate corporate citizen when configuring the alert as the members of that group may not appreciate the flood of emails that they may receive.

The Limitations

Let me digress here and show what an alert looks like for an individual user. In this case I have created an alert to myself on a document library called docs. If go to the actions menu, then alerts, then select, ‘view my existing alerts on this site’, you will see the following screen.

Note that the alert called ‘Docs’ is a hyperlink to the edit alert page. From here you can modify the alert such as changing the frequency, the change type, etc.

Now for the group alert. The only way to access the alert is to go to Site Actions / Site Settings. Then select ‘User Alerts’ from the Site Administration column.

In the drop down list ‘Display Alert For’ you will now be able to see the group name that you specified. Click update to show the details. You will notice that from this screen the list of alerts for either users or groups is not a hyperlink.

So the big downside is that you cannot modify the alert for the group. You can only delete it and recreate it, which will send another announcement email to the group.

You can set the peoplepicker-onlysearchwithinsitecollection property to yes to only show users that are a member of that site. This is great for extranet type site collections that you want to stop them from browsing all of you AD to find details on your users.

The example syntax given on the site is:-

stsadm -o setproperty –url http://server –pn peoplepicker-onlysearchwithinsitecollection –pv yes

Note that if a user knows the fully qualified login name they can still select those names.

If you ever receive the classic sharepoint error:-

An error has occurred.
Please contact your system administrator if this problem persists.

and would like to have some actually useful info on what has happened try the following.  (Quoting Paul directly here)

To get a bit more info make the following
changes to your Web Front end server in the Web.config file of one of
the WebApplicaitons generating the error.
Search for CallStack= and change the setting from false to true.
Search for CustomErrors= and change the setting from Off to RemoteOnly.
(This means that the CallStack will only show on a browser on the server
console. Remote users will still get the SharePoint error page.
Then do an IISreset.
Finally, go to the WFE server console and browse to one of the pages
generating the error. Instead of seeing “An error has occurred”. You
will see a full stack dump and exception statement for the error that is
occurring. That may give you enough information to find out what is
going on.

Mark Harrison originally posted some reg hacking on how to this. You can also do it from the front end of IE7.

For example if you want to add a people search from your Sharepoint 2007 corporate portal. Browse to the portal and run a people search with the criteria of ‘TEST’. Then copy the URL of the results page. Next click on the search drop down in IE and select ‘Find more providers..’

On this page copy in the URL of the results page and give it some display name ’eg Corporate People Search’.

The power of this is that your users can now directly launch and people search from IE7 without having to first browsing to the sharepoint site.

Now combine this with the registry hack that Mark Harrison posted you can now roll this out to all your users.

I have created a site collection based on the team template. This is what the standard search drop down looks like.

Go to Site Actions, Site Settings. Then select Seach Settings from the Site Collection Administration group. Below is the default settings. Note how it defaults to do not custom scopes.

Now change the setting to use custom scopes, and enter the following relative URL /SearchCenter/Pages (as per the example on the page). See below.

Once you OK this a browse to the team site collection home you will now see the additional scopes on the drop down of ‘All sites’ and ‘People’ plus a link to advanced search.

Taking from his article is the following reg hack instructions on registering the ifilter with the sharepoint search.

1. After you install the Foxit, add a pdf extension in MOSS search settings
2. Open regedit, locate [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Office Server\12.0\Search\Setup\ContentIndexCommon\Filters\Extension\.pdf]
3. Change the default value to {987f8d1a-26e6-4554-b007-6b20e2680632} . (You can get this handler addin value using Citeknet ifilter explorer)
4. Cmdline: net stop osearch
5. Cmdline: net start osearch
6. Do a full crawl.

(PS Adir, love the MOSS club tag line on your blog.)

(PPS, To everyone else Adir Ron has some great articles on sharepoint search on his blog.)

This guide shows how to create a site collection template that will appear on the create site collection screen from central admin or from the create site page if self-service site management is enabled.

1. First create a site collection based on what ever template that you would like to start with for example the Collaboration / Team Site template. Customise the template to what you would like. For example create additional document libraries and set versioning.
2. From the site settings, Look and Feel , Save site as template. Give it a file name, template name and description. Optionally choose if you would like any content that you have added to the template to be included.
3. Once this is done it will create the template.stp in the site template gallery. Browse to this gallery and download the file. Once you have this file copy it to your sharepoint server. Also if you are going to re-use the template you might want to delete the template from the gallery and then delete it from both recycle bins in the site collection recycle bin.
4. To add the template to central administration site templates you will need to use stsadm. I recommend that you add the path to the bin directory containing stsadm.exe to the system environment variables.

C:\source\site-templates>stsadm -o addtemplate -filename “project-simple.stp” -title “Project site – simple” -description “Project site template with a simple structure”

Operation completed successfully.

IIS must be restarted before this change will take effect. To restart IIS, opena command prompt window and type iisreset.

Deleting a template from the command line. Below is a code snipet of how to list the templates installed and then how to delete the template based on its title.

C:\source\site-templates>stsadm -o enumtemplates

IT Project Site – Language: 1033 – Site Template: _GLOBAL_#0 – Template Id: 1

C:\source\site-templates>stsadm -o deletetemplate -title “IT Project Site”

Operation completed successfully.

IIS must be restarted before this change will take effect. To restart IIS, open
a command prompt window and type iisreset.

C:\source\site-templates>

A recent whitepaper from Microsoft,  ‘Information architecture in Office SharePoint Server’ (http://technet2.microsoft.com/Office/en-us/library/902bbfaa-d6cc-4e8b-a1f5-6215168f47681033.mspx ) does give a good example of how it might be used.

For our deployment I’ll show the following example. We will have a site collection for each project site. Each of these site collections will exist under a managed path called ‘/project/’. For those of you that are interested I am choosing to use site collections over subsites mainly as a method of keeping the content databases at a manageable size. (Our company has about 10,000 projects on the go at any point in time.) The disadvantage in this design is that site collections for projects can appear isolated and difficult to navigate back to the root site collection.

So on each site collection (I have added this to the site template) I have set the portal site connection to the root site collection home page. As you can see from the following image, in the top left hand corner it is showing a bread crumb trail back to the root site collection.

The other way I could have provided a link back to the root site collection would be to add a link to the ‘Top Link Bar’ settings also under Site settings. This would provide an additional tab next to the ‘Home’ tab in the picture above. I think that the Portal Site Collection option is better as it provides a context of the root site collection being ‘above’ the project site collection and allows me to save the top link bar tabs for subsites of the project or links to other sites, servers, etc.

I always forget these steps so I’m blogging it to my site so I don’t lose it again.

Configuring Large File Support

This snippet from an article on Configuring Large File Support in relation to some fixes in SP2 of WSS 2.0 relate very closely with your WSS 3.0 or MOSS farm when configuring your WFEs/farm to support large files.  You likely won’t find this documentation elsewhere.

From the article on office.microsoft.com:

The biggest change included in Windows SharePoint Services SP1 is the support for uploading large files. By default, the maximum size for uploading files is set to 50 MB. If you need to be able to upload larger files (such as when you use smigrate.exe to migrate a site between servers), you can change this setting to any value up to 2 GB (2047 MB).

To configure large file support you must increase the default upload size in SharePoint Central Administration. You may also need to perform the following additional actions (depending on your hardware configuration):

• Tune the Microsoft Internet Information Services (IIS) connection timeout setting.

  The default timeout for connections in IIS is 120 seconds (2 minutes). Depending on your maximum file size and how long it takes for the file to be uploaded, you may not need to change this setting. If, however, IIS is timing out when you upload large files, you can change this property to ensure that larger files can be uploaded successfully.

• Increase the default chunk size for large files.

  The large-file-chunk-size property sets the amount of data that can be read from server running SQL Server at one time. If you have a file that is greater than your chunk size (such as 70 MB when the chunk size is set to 5 MB), the file would be read in 14 chunks (70 / 5). The chunk size is not related to the maximum upload file size. The chunk size simply specifies the amount of data that can be read from a file at one time. By default, the large-file-chunk-size property is set to 5 MB. If you notice performance or scale problems on the client or server, then you may need to tune this setting to get the performance you are targeting. Note that if you raise the chunk size too high, the files might use up too much front-end memory and you may need to lower this setting.

• Increase the maximum size limit for Web Parts.

  By default, the maximum size limit for a Web Part is 1 MB. If you need to accomodate large Web Parts, you can change this setting in the web.config file for your server or servers running Windows SharePoint Services.

Increase the maximum upload size

1. Click Start, point to All Programs, point to Administrative Tools, and then click SharePoint Central Administration.
2. Under Virtual Server Configuration, click Configure virtual server settings.
3. On the Virtual Server List page, click the virtual server you want to change.
4. On the Virtual Server Settings page, under Virtual Server Management, click Virtual server general settings.
5. Under Maximum upload size, type the maximum file size (in MB) that you want to allow to be uploaded.
6. Click OK.

If IIS is timing out when you upload large files, you can configure the Connection timeout setting in IIS to allow more than the default 120 seconds (2 minutes).

Tune the IIS connection timeout

1. Click Start, point to All Programs, point to Administrative Tools, and then click Internet Information Services (IIS) Manager.
2. Right-click the virtual server you want to configure, and then click Properties.
3. Click the Web Site tab.
4. In the Connections section, in the Connection timeout box, type the number of seconds you want IIS to wait before timing out.
5. Click OK.

Increase the default chunk size for large files

The large?file?chunk?size property must be set from the command line. This property is configured for a server or server farm, and cannot be configured for an individual virtual server. To set this property, use the following syntax:

Stsadm.exe ?o setproperty ?pn large?file?chunk?size ?pv <size in bytes>.

After making a change to this property, you must restart IIS. You can restart IIS by typing iisreset on the command line.

Increase the maximum limit for Web Parts

This change is required only when working with large Web Parts. The maximum limit for Web Parts is set to 1048576 bytes by default.

1. On your server computer running Windows SharePoint Services, open Notepad.
2. In Notepad, navigate to the %HomeDrive%\Inetpub\wwwroot folder and open the web.config file.
3. Locate the PropertySize attribute in the configuration\SharePoint\WebPartLimits element.
4. Change the PropertySize attribute to the maximum size you need.
5. Save and close the web.config file.

Large file support limitations

The following features do not support files larger than 50 MB:

• Virus checking. (Joel: I do believe this is the case.  It’s true as well that files over 16MB by default are not indexed, this can be changed.)
• Picture libraries (Joel: really?)
• Streaming files (Joel: We don’t support streaming files anyway do we?  Love for someone to explain this one.)
• Site templates (limit of 10 MB Joel: Only in WSS 2.0, this is deafult and can be increased in WSS 3.0).

This KB “Error message when you try to upload a large file to a document library on a Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 site: “Request timed out”” has some great info on configuring the server to allow larger file sizes and increasing the time out limits.  Caution!  Whenever you increase timouts, you are essentially increasing the length of sessions and you’ll have more concurrent sessions. 

Increase the maximum upload size
1. Click Start, point to All Programs, point to Administrative Tools, and then click SharePoint Central Administration.
2. Under Virtual Server Configuration, click Configure virtual server settings. On the Virtual Server List page, click the virtual server that you want to change.
3. On the Virtual Server Settings page, under Virtual Server Management, click Virtual server general settings.
4. Under Maximum upload size, type the maximum file size in megabytes that you want, and then click OK. You can specify a maximum file size up to 2,047 megabytes.

Increase the connection time-out setting
By default, the IIS connection time-out setting is 120 seconds. To increase the connection time-out setting, follow these steps: 1. Click Start, point to All Programs, point to Administrative Tools, and then click Internet Information Services (IIS) Manager.
2. Right-click the virtual server that you want to configure, and then click Properties.
3. Click the Web Site tab. Under Connections, type the number of seconds that you want in the Connection time-out box, and then click OK.

Add the executionTimeout value
1. Use Notepad to open the Web.config file.

By default, this file is in the following location:
Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web server extensions\12\TEMPLATE\LAYOUTS
2. Add the executionTimeout value that you want. For example, replace the value as follows.

Existing code
 <location path=”upload.aspx”>
    <system.web>
      <httpRuntime maxRequestLength=”2097151″ />
    </system.web>
  </location>
Replacement code
 <location path=”upload.aspx”>
    <system.web>
      <httpRuntime executionTimeout=”999999″ maxRequestLength=”2097151″ />
    </system.web>
  </location>
3. After you change the file, click Save on the File menu.
4. Use Notepad to open the Web application Web.config file. By default, this file is in the following folder:
Inetpub\wwwroot\wss\VirtualDirectories\VirtualDirectoryFolder
5. Change the following line in the file.

Existing line
<httpRuntime maxRequestLength=”51200″ />
Replacement line
<httpRuntime executionTimeout=”999999″ maxRequestLength=”51200″ />

6. After you change the file, click Save on the File menu.
7. Exit Notepad.

From Joel Oleson’s SharePoint Land