Posted by: gavinadams | 13 December, 2007

Sharepoint 2007 SP1 released

Well it’s finally been released, SP1 for MOSS / Sharepoint 2007.

The best place to start is the technet resource centre.

Looks like there a few ‘gotchas’!

Watch out for the known issue of killing the registry settings for the foxit pdf ifilter if you are using that.

Looks like go slow, take care and test, test, test, for applying this SP.

Posted by: gavinadams | 29 November, 2007

MOSS / Sharepoint 2007 SP1 release notes summary

01-DEC-2007, just an update Joel has posted on the official sharepoint team blog a further update on SP1.

————————————————————————

Cezary Aniśko has just posted some notes that look like a high level summary of what will be in Sharepoint 2007 SP1. Unfortunately his post is in Polish, which not a language that I know. However there is still plenty of info that can be gathered from his post.

http://blogs.technet.com/canisko/archive/2007/11/28/service-pack-1-dla-sharepoint-server-2007-i-windows-sharepoint-services-3-0.aspx

I’m also copying it over there just in case it ‘disappears’.

———————————-

Service Pack 1 dla MOSS 2007 i WSS 3.0 wniesie:

· Wsparcie instalacji i pracy MOSS 2007 z SP1 i WSS 3.0 z SP 1 na Windows Server 2008. Ze stron Microsoft będzie można pobrać odpowiednio przygotowane pliki instalacyjne MOSS 2007 i WSS 3.0 zawierające w sobie SP1

· Wsparcie technologii AJAX. Możliwe będzie używanie Microsoft AJAX 1.0 Control toolkit dla Microsoft ASP.NET, AJAX 1.0 Extensions dla ASP.NET

· Remote Blob Storage API w WSS 3.0 (937901). Pozwoli ISVs budować providery do składowania plików na zewnątrz SQL Server. Odpowiednie API zostanie dodane do SDK

· SP 1 będzie zawierać w sobie 60 hotfix’ów (MOSS i WSS)

· Nowe komendy STSAdm:

  • Mergecontentdbs – For consolidating or repartitioning site collections across content databases (939035)
  • Rename site – renaming host named site collections (939535)

· People Picker ability to scope to an OU (806244)

Najważniejsze hotfixy zawarte w SP1

• Hotfix 926284: List view web part not retained saving template

• Hotfix 938888: Edit document fails/IE Crash side by side Office

• Hotfix 938663: Timer jobs delayed one hour because of DST

• Hotfix 936867: Inherit permissions causes destructive error (lose permissions to site)

• Hotfix 930807: Cannot open WSS alerts in Outlook cached mode

• Hotfix 932816: Workflow not continue after Pause For Duration

• Hotfix 936867: Export fails with FatalError User cannot be found

• Hotfix 934790: peoplepicker-searchadcustomquery filter broken

• Hotfix 926284: List view web part not retained saving template

• Hotfix 938888: Edit document fails/IE Crash side by side Office

• Hotfix 932091: Hotfix packages break customer deployments primarily

• Hotfix 936867: Inherit perms causes destructive error

• Daylight savings time update

• Fixes to support Indexing Public Folders based on Exchange 2007

• Fixed Crawling IBM Notes Indexing ID access issues

• Fix to Alerts logic to address mails not being sent in specific scenarios

• Migration related fixes

• Important security cross site scripting vulnerability

Obszary ingerencji SP1

Content Managament

§ MOSS: Scrambled data in case of a COMMA in the username, “tp_title”, CommaSeparatedAccounts, _layouts/PageSettings.aspx and peoplepicker

§ File cannot be move to the root of its document library

§ MOSS: “Check for Unpublished items” function shows DBCS word in vertical lines.

§ Access Denied when running spellcheck in a subweb without permission in parent

§ Variations: Create Hierarchies does not Dispose SPWeb resulting in memory leaking with large hierarchies

§ CMS12 – Variation fails with ASP.NET 2.0 webparts.

SharePoint Designer

§ Workflow generated on German MOSS 2007 site with German SharePoint Designer 2007 does not work as expected, falls always through to the fallback

§ WSS 3.0: DateTime field in a “WebPart” cannot be updated in any other languages except US-English and Canada-French

Project Server

§ PSVR2007 Long names in Timesheet view can cause for cumbersome navigating to input time

§ Deadlocks with UpdateTask PSI calls

§ European Extended characters are not correctly displayed by controls in PWA

§ “File not found” error when attempting to create a new issue, risk or deliverable in a project.

§ PRJSVR2007 – Received Unknown error when Import a Timesheet in PWA

§ PSVR2007 : Custom filter for Project Type, in Project Centre view, does not work

§ PWA2007: Project Center Team View does not show RBS code

§ PSVR2007 : Custom Field Default Value box in PWA does not display correctly with multi-level values with long descriptions.

§ PSVR2007 – Assigning two resources to a task with a custom field can cause an ‘unexpected error’ on My Task page

§ IE has encountered a problem with an add-on and needs to close – PJGRID12.ocx

§ PSVR2007 : Unable to view all potential owners in the Project Owner field in the Edit project properties page

Search

§ Error message: “The query server index file location on Server_Name is not shared”

§ Dynamics: URL for search result detail wrong for special characters

§ Manage Search Service provides incorrect data for drive on query server

§ People returned twice on Intranet tab

§ Need a supported method to cleanup/remove orphaned entries in mssdocprops that result in people eing returned multiple times on Intranet tab

§ Advanced search is not working with the property ‘created date’ with site collection

§ needs the ability to exclude content during crawl that is behind a complex url

§ Queries on the live redmond SSP take over 3mins and occasionally timeout during index master merge

§ unable to add best bet with url including a plus sign ‘+’

§ Intermittent site collection usage reports timeout error

§ NTBACKUP always fails with TimeOut Error(0×80042319) on Moss Search Server

§ ‘Refine Your Search’ returns incorrect URLs through a reverse proxy

§ [WSS Search & MOSS Search] stsadm and Web UI do not allow you to reset the service credentials when they become corrupt.

§ Search does not crawl attachment to discussion board

§ Incremental crawl will index http://…/07.020n subsites but full-crawl never

§ Inability to revert a property back to default type

§ Searching for terms with character ‘ in them cause search result error

§ stsadm -o editssp is unable to replace a down indexer with a new value

§ site admin selects add best bets gets access denied

§ Retrieving search results through code, FullTextSqlQuery statement and valid search results omitted when ordering by null or empty columns

§ Advanced search not returning results as expected

MOSS 2007

§ Owstimer memory leak

§ discussion items with a URL in the title and -includeusersecurity cause PRIME import to fail

§ (^) Using audience-based web parts on NTLM based site breaks anonymous access on Forms-Based Authorization site that is mapped to the NTLM site

§ MCMS 2002 to MOSS 2007 migration fails on x64 MOSS server due memory read error (access violation) on SID conversion

§ Availability web control on My Site Profile page off by 1 hour (DST)

§ Personal documents on MySite that was created with language other than the default language has the same permissions than Shared Documents

§ Manager field cannot be updated to null value which causes all users with no manager to be peers

§ New site not saved in the SiteList of sitedirectory

§ Customer needs ability to map datetime fields in BDC against managed property

§ ‘I Need to…’ webpart fails if more than one are on the same page

§ RFH – Search doesn’t process membership for DLs in OUs with a comma in the name

§ SPSv2 –> MOSS: When a v2 portal is upgraded to v3, on subsites that were Topic areas, changing the masterpage doesn’t take effect

§ The ampersand of the image URL displayed on the public page of the Personal Site will be decoded as &

WSS

§ WSSv3 – Error at ‘Manage Permissions from Parent’

§ WSS v3 ‘Operation aborted’ error on mouse hover

§ Versioning not applied correctly to documents

§ Resorting Content Type causes template type association to be messed up.

§ RFH: Content-type looses required field during save as template

§ Unable to cancel ItemDeleting event using Drag’n Drop in Explorer View

§ Deadlock failures on ListItem related operations (on multi-proc machines)

§ Import fails for pages with lookup columns

§ Workflow task to copy list item fails if infopath form has more than 15 boolean fields.

§ Group By does not always work correctly for Date/Time columns

§ “Cannot complete this action” error message when creating a list from an STP file when the “EnableAssignToEmail” was set to true in the original list.

§ Calendar items beyond 5th of the month are not displayed in Monthly view if selected date is 1st day of the month

§ Workflow file range condition fails to fire if initial value is 1

§ WSSV3 List Group By Date is Off by One Day

§ Title and alt tag in Webpart Menu Area HTML encoded twice

§ failed to set item based security on list 998th item in a list which has multi value lookup column – incorrect SQL syntax

§ Anonymous user can’t reply to discussion board

Jak wdrożyć SP1 w istniejącym środowisku?

Dla WSS 3.0: http://technet2.microsoft.com/windowsserver/WSS/en/library/91649a7e-6b5a-4e5a-9ee5-51951f4b857f1033.mspx

Dla MOSS 2007: http://technet2.microsoft.com/Office/en-us/library/f484f5f2-35bb-4d70-bf56-dd1c4c287c721033.mspx?mfr=true

Posted by: gavinadams | 7 November, 2007

Sharepoint 2007 SP1 – must be close

Hang on to your seats SP1 for Sharepoint 2007 must be close.

I just received an alert regarding a sharepoint 2007 SP1 issue from Microsoft KB.

After you install SharePoint Server 2007 Service Pack 1, the maximum disk space that is used on a query server or on an index server increases to 2.85 times the physical size of the index

 

Looks like its time to redo those disk space calculations

I’ve just read a great post on SMB v2.0 by Kurt Roggen. His article links to a whitepaper that microsoft has released from the Tolly group on ‘Enhanced Network Performance with Microsoft Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008‘.

Buried in this whitepaper is some testing of tranfering 10MB word file from WSS 3.0 running on Windows Server 2003/2008 to XP and Vista clients. To summarise my interpretation of the results for 10Mbps / 50ms WAN link changing from Windows Server 2003 to 2008 makes little difference, however changing from Windows XP to Windows Vista downloading from either 2003 or 2008 server makes a very big difference. Throughput goes from 4.2Mbps for XP to 9.8Mbps for Vista.

The appendix in this document also gives a detailed breakdown of the stats at other network bandwidths and latencies. As the bandwidth decreases and the latency increases the effect of changing from Windows Server 2003 to Windows Server 2008 start to become noticble. However this is only with Windows XP as a client. With Vista as the client and the this network condition the difference between the server version is negligble.

The other great piece of information in this article is about modifying some settings for Windows Server 2003.  Microsoft KB820129 documents the http.sys registry settings for IIS. The tolly group whitepaper recommends changing the MaxBytesPerSend value to its maximum value. I haven’t tested this is our lab yet but its well worth a look.

Up till now I’ve not seen much of a benefit of moving the standard corporate desktop O/S from XP to Vista but based on these results I think it should be given stronger consideration.

Posted by: gavinadams | 6 November, 2007

Sharepoint Logging Spy

Every now and then it pays just to troll through codeplex for new sharepoint tools.

I found this gem this morning. The Sharepoint Logging Spy. It’s beta 1.3 at the moment. You will need to run it from your sharepoint server but it can collect sharepoint logs and event logs from multiple systems

It has one known issue according to the codeplex site that it cant collect sharepoint logs if they have moved from the default location. I don’t see that being too much of a problem on test servers but on production servers I would always recommend changing the logs from the system drive to an alternative disk or partition.

[a server crashing due to the system drive filling up from IIS or sharepoint logs can be a bit of a career limiting move!]

Anyhow the tools looks great so far, well worth a look and well worth adding to your ‘toolkit’

Posted by: gavinadams | 29 October, 2007

stsadm xml output and excel

This is kind of obvious but I just hadn’t thought about doing it.

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.

Posted by: gavinadams | 26 October, 2007

Sending alerts to groups in Sharepoint 2007

Creating an alert that sends to a group can be a powerful feature in Sharepoint, however even though it seems straight forward there are some tricks to make it work and it is ‘clunky’ in some areas.

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.

image

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.

image

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.

Posted by: gavinadams | 16 October, 2007

Assistant mapped user profile property is broken

After a bit of research I’m giving up on this one.

What I want to do is map the sharepoint user profile property ‘assistant’ to active directory (AD). I could map it to 1 of 2 attributes in AD, either ‘assistant’ or ‘msExchAssistantName’. The assistant attribute in AD stores the DN of that user. Much in the same way as the manager attribute in AD. The msExchAssistantName attribute stores the displayname of the user.

Initially I was mapping assistant to assistant however the problem was that the profile page for a user would display the DN of the assistant. Very ugly!

So I change the mapping to msExchAssistantName hoping that might work but no it now shows the assistant displayname on the profile page however it does not fix the click through problem.

In both of these cases the assistant field is a hyperlink to what you would expect to be the user profile page of the assistant but in both cases sharepoint does not translate it correctly and returns an error page with ‘user not found’.

Now I’m pretty sure that the assistant attribute in AD is widely used and I think that this is a bug or a case of a not quite completed component by the sharepoint dev team. And if they can get it to work for the manager attribute why not for the assistant attribute? During my research I found little info related to the issue except for one post from Joris Poelmans on YASQ – AD Assistant field not correctly imported into SharePoint User Profile database. I have to agree with Joris that this is yet another sharepoint quirk.

If any sharepoint microsoft’y is reading this could they pass it along to the product team and have it fixed please.

Posted by: gavinadams | 9 October, 2007

Enabling the inbuilt msg ifilter on sharepoint (even 64bit!)

One of our big decisions on the proposed physical architecture of our sharepoint farms has been can we go 64bit on the index server. For us the ability to index .msg files is crucial and until now I thought I would have to purchase a third party ifilter. The problem being that the third party does not have a 64bit version of their ifilter and initial discussion with the vendor indicated that building a 64bit ifilter would not be easy.

Some recent updates to the technet sharepoint doco were pointed out to me yesterday that listed msg indexing support as being available out of the box.
This is the relevant page:-

File types and IFilter reference (Office SharePoint Server)
URL: http://technet2.microsoft.com/Office/en-us/library/09357d8e-37b9-4e96-b8fd-f17b990d010a1033.mspx

So this doc basically states that msg filters are inbuilt. So I do a search of some content that is in the body of a .msg file and no results are returned.

Now I’ve been down this path before with the foxit pdf ifilters so I’m pretty sure that it is a problem with missing values in the registry. I also note at the bottom of the above reference page is a link to an article on search onenote 2007 files. This document provides hints as to the missing registry keys.

Install and register the OneNote IFilter (Office SharePoint Server 2007)
URL: http://technet2.microsoft.com/Office/en-us/library/2e715e42-c09b-4b4f-a082-b19e1cad96031033.mspx

Crank up regedit check that the :-

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Office Server\12.0\Search\Setup\ContentIndexCommon\Filters\Extension\.msg keys exist.
(They should do, all my installs have this by default)

The following key is the one that is missing.

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Office Server\12.0\Search\Setup\Filters\.msg]
“Extension”=”msg”
“FileTypeBucket”=dword:00000001
“MimeTypes”=”application/vnd.ms-outlook”

Now, I have taken a guess on the mimetype for outlook. I can find no mimetypes for .msg files in the registries on my servers and my workstations. A web search yielded 3 possibilities, “application/vnd.ms-outlook”, “application/x-msg” & “application/msoutlook” 

So the next thing was to restart the office search service, and iisreset. I think reset all crawled content (purge the index). Then I ran a full crawl.

Fortunately I got lucky on the mimetype and the index successfully crawled the content of the email! Now for the caveats. I’ve only done basic testing. I haven’t checked if the msg ifilter will pull an attachment (eg word doc) and index that as well. Also I haven’t checked this with Microsoft, though I think it is worthy of a bug report (at least in the doco).

Also thanks to Mutaz from MCS for his initial guidance on pointing me in the right direction this.

Posted by: gavinadams | 13 September, 2007

Restricting Self-Service Site Creation

This is one of those things that had me beating my head against a wall for the last couple of hours and in the end its all in the doco you just need to find it.

I have a knowledge management sharepoint web app and I want to turn on self service site creation (SSSC) so that each ‘community of practice’ (CoP) site will be created as its own site collection. By default anyone who has read permission to the KM portal will be able to use the SSSC and create additional site collections. In my environment this would be bad and lead to lots of uncontrolled sites. What I need is the ability to lock this tool down so that only our knowledge managers can create additional CoP sites.

So I know from the default security model that the Read, Contribute, Design and Full Control ‘Permission Levels’ have the ability to ‘Use Self-Service Site Creation’.  What I want to do is create a group that I can add users to who are allowed to create sites. This visio diagram is a great reference for all the permissions -  ‘Model- Office SharePoint Server Application Security‘.

So the procedure from the start follows.

  1. Turn on Self Service site management. This is found in central admin / app mgmt. Make sure that you select the correct web app.

    image

  2. My KM Portal root site collection is based on the Publishing / Collaboration Portal template, so to make the create site link from the ‘Sites’ subsite link to the scsignup.aspx page, we go to the ’site collection administration / site directory settings’ page and turn on ‘Create new site collections from Site Directory’. This will change the create site link.
     image
  3. Next we need to remove the ‘Use Self-Service Site Creation’ permission from the default permission levels. So to do this on the root site collection go to site settings / Advanced Permissions. From this page drop down the settings menu and select permission levels.

    image

  4. Next I click on the ‘Read’ permission level and then scroll down to the ‘Site Permissions’ section and un-check the ‘Use Self-Service Site Creation’ permission. I then need to remove this from the other groups, in my case the groups are: contribute, approve, Manage Hierarchy, Design, and View Only. I’m leaving it on the Full Control permission level.

    image

  5. Back on the permission page I create a new sharepoint group called ‘KM Portal Site Creators’ and assign the new permission level to this group.

    image

Well thats it. I think this is another example of the default permissions being to open and a real world example of how to trim them back.

Also this is the doco on the technet site that descibes how to ‘Creating custom permission levels’. http://technet2.microsoft.com/Office/en-us/library/c5dd8b7e-202d-4d33-8535-5c03f88ea1ff1033.mspx?mfr=true

« Newer Posts - Older Posts »

Categories