Adobe labs acrobat v8 ifilter for 64bit sharepoint – prerelease

Posted on 25 January, 2008 by gavinadams

Just stumbled across this on a Google search.

Adobe Labs have a pre-release of how to support Adobe Reader v8.1 ifilter on 64bit sharepoint.

I’ll admit that I haven’t tested this yet and it involves a 64bit ‘thunking’ layer. In the past I have seen some instructions on to use this technique to ‘hack’ together a custom 32bit ifilter handler onto a 64bit system.

The main significance of this is that currently the only cleanest way of supporting pdf indexing on sharepoint 64bit platforms is to use foxit pdf ifilter. However this is commercial software that is priced based on the number of CPU cores. (As at 25JAN2008 this was “License cost for each server with up to two CPU cores is $329.99. Each additional CPU core costs $129.99.”) Now with most production servers these days being dual quad core processors (ie 8 processing cores) This would be US$1109.93 for each production server. Congrats does go to foxit for seeing a large hole left in the market by Adobe being so slow to support the 64bit platform and providing a solution.

The other comment worth making is that the foxit 64bit ifilter may be coded natively in 64bit but I’m not sure of this. Whereas the Adobe solution is taking the existing 32bit ifilter in wrapping it into 64bit which does involve a processing cost overhead. If you had a large index with lots pdf documents then going for a native pdf ifilter could bring a significant performance difference.

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Posted in ifilter, Search, sharepoint

Hotfix released for timer job errors – Event ID’s 7076, 6398 , 6432 and 6482

Posted on 15 January, 2008 by gavinadams

‘cwhite’ has just posted on the sharepoint ‘from the field’ blog on a hotfix release to fix timer job issues. This has also been known as the ‘timer job shocker’. Initially I read some reports that it might be due to a security update to the .NET framework but it re-appeared for me. This one has been has been a tough one to track down so I’m glad to see that a hotfix has been released.

In the application event log you will see events for 7076, 6398, 6432 and for me I also saw 6482.

I’ll copy and paste the full events from my test server below.

The KB article is here. The anonying thing about this KB article is that it is categorised as only applying to IIS and not sharepoint even though the big driver to fix this seem to have been MOSS related. That means that it would be difficult to find this KB article if you are restricting your KB searches by product.

——————————————–

Event Type:    Error
Event Source:    Windows SharePoint Services 3
Event Category:    Timer
Event ID:    6398
Date:        11/01/2008
Time:        12:10:08 PM
User:        N/A
Computer:    MOSSTEST
Description:
The Execute method of job definition Microsoft.Office.Server.Administration.ApplicationServerAdministrationServiceJob (ID 9668b02b-5f13-4963-bf0b-181c81272dea) threw an exception. More information is included below.

Attempted to read or write protected memory. This is often an indication that other memory is corrupt.

——————————————–

Event Type:    Error
Event Source:    Office SharePoint Server
Event Category:    Office Server Shared Services
Event ID:    6482
Date:        11/01/2008
Time:        12:14:07 PM
User:        N/A
Computer:    MOSSTEST
Description:
Application Server Administration job failed for service instance Microsoft.Office.Server.Search.Administration.SearchAdminSharedWebServiceInstance (5e5393a6-039a-4896-a727-04818d85b326).

Reason: Exception from HRESULT: 0x80005006

Techinal Support Details:
System.Runtime.InteropServices.COMException (0x80005006): Exception from HRESULT: 0x80005006
   at System.DirectoryServices.Interop.UnsafeNativeMethods.IAds.PutEx(Int32 lnControlCode, String bstrName, Object vProp)
   at System.DirectoryServices.PropertyValueCollection.OnClearComplete()
   at System.DirectoryServices.PropertyValueCollection.set_Value(Object value)
   at Microsoft.SharePoint.Metabase.ApplicationPool.set_IdentityType(ApplicationPoolIdentityType value)
   at Microsoft.SharePoint.Administration.SPProvisioningAssistant.ProvisionIisApplicationPool(String name, ApplicationPoolIdentityType identityType, String userName, SecureString password, TimeSpan idleTimeout, TimeSpan periodicRestartTime)
   at Microsoft.SharePoint.Administration.SPMetabaseManager.ProvisionIisApplicationPool(String name, Int32 identityType, String userName, SecureString password, TimeSpan idleTimeout, TimeSpan periodicRestartTime)
   at Microsoft.Office.Server.Administration.SharedWebServiceInstance.Synchronize()
   at Microsoft.Office.Server.Administration.ApplicationServerJob.ProvisionLocalSharedServiceInstances(Boolean isAdministrationServiceJob)

——————————————–

Event Type:    Error
Event Source:    Office SharePoint Server
Event Category:    Office Server Shared Services
Event ID:    7076
Date:        11/01/2008
Time:        12:14:08 PM
User:        N/A
Computer:    MOSSTEST
Description:
An exception occurred while executing the Application Server Administration job.

Message: Exception from HRESULT: 0x80005006

Techinal Support Details:
System.Runtime.InteropServices.COMException (0x80005006): Exception from HRESULT: 0x80005006
   at System.DirectoryServices.Interop.UnsafeNativeMethods.IAds.PutEx(Int32 lnControlCode, String bstrName, Object vProp)
   at System.DirectoryServices.PropertyValueCollection.OnClearComplete()
   at System.DirectoryServices.PropertyValueCollection.set_Value(Object value)
   at Microsoft.SharePoint.Metabase.ApplicationPool.set_UserName(String value)
   at Microsoft.SharePoint.Administration.SPProvisioningAssistant.ProvisionIisApplicationPool(String name, ApplicationPoolIdentityType identityType, String userName, SecureString password, TimeSpan idleTimeout, TimeSpan periodicRestartTime)
   at Microsoft.SharePoint.Administration.SPMetabaseManager.ProvisionIisApplicationPool(String name, Int32 identityType, String userName, SecureString password, TimeSpan idleTimeout, TimeSpan periodicRestartTime)
   at Microsoft.Office.Server.Administration.SharedWebServiceInstance.CreateSharedWebServiceApplicationPool(SharedResourceProvider srp)
   at Microsoft.Office.Server.Administration.ApplicationServerJob.ProvisionLocalSharedServiceInstances(Boolean isAdministrationServiceJob)

——————————————–

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Posted in bug, sharepoint

Publishing pages with fine grained permissions not indexed

Posted on 13 December, 2007 by gavinadams

I’m on sharepoint designer training this week and getting up to speed to sharepoint publishing and WCM.

I spotted another bizarre default behaviour in sharepoint yesterday.

If you have a publishing site and you apply individual permissions to pages (also known as fine grained permissions), which is not beyond the realm of possibility on an intranet or similar website by default these pages will not be included in the search results.

Go to the site settings for the site and from the ‘Site Administration’ column select ‘Search Visibility’. You will notice that aspx pages by default are not indexed if they have fine grained permissions.

image

This just seems to be a bizarre default setting. Given that search results are security trimmed why is the default behaviour not to index all aspx pages?

Anyhow change the setting to ‘Always index all aspx pages on this site’ and they will be indexed.

The nice thing on the screen above is that the sentence above the radio buttons will indicate if your site has fine grained permissions.

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Posted in publishing, Search, sharepoint, WCM

Sharepoint 2007 SP1 released

Posted on 13 December, 2007 by gavinadams

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.

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Posted in service pack, sharepoint

MOSS / Sharepoint 2007 SP1 release notes summary

Posted on 29 November, 2007 by gavinadams

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(0x80042319) 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

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Posted in service pack, sharepoint

Sharepoint 2007 SP1 – must be close

Posted on 7 November, 2007 by gavinadams

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

Posted in service pack, sharepoint

Network enhancements in Vista / Windows Server 2008 and sharepoint

Posted on 6 November, 2007 by gavinadams

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.

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Posted in network, sharepoint

Sharepoint Logging Spy

Posted on 6 November, 2007 by gavinadams

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 in sharepoint, tools

stsadm xml output and excel

Posted on 29 October, 2007 by gavinadams

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 in howto, sharepoint

Sending alerts to groups in Sharepoint 2007

Posted on 26 October, 2007 by gavinadams

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.

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Posted in howto, sharepoint