David Rosenberg's Writings

I’m in the process of upgrading our internal SharePoint farm to new load balanced virtualized web front ends. After configuring the servers and adding them into the nlb cluster I would consistently get blue screens.

My install sequence for Hyper-V VMs:
Install Windows Server 2008 Full Install Standard
Configure Static IP
Join to Domain
Add roles:

• Application Server
• Web Server (IIS)

Add features:

• SMTP Server
• Network Load Balancing
• Windows Powershell

Install ASP.NET 2.0 AJAX
Install .NET 3.5 SP1
Install latest Windows Updates
Create servicePrincipalNames
Enable Kerberos Delegation for Computer Accounts and Service Accounts
Enable Windows Authentication in IIS

• Update windows\system32\inserv\config\applicationHost.config : <windowsAuthentication enabled=”true” useKernalMode=”true” useAppPoolCredentials=”true”>

Install SharePoint 2007 w/SP1
Install all WSS/MOSS updates through October (Still testing Dec in our QA and Dev Farms)
Join Server to SharePoint Farm
Add server to Network Load Balancing Cluster

Once Server is installed and production traffic starts hitting it, it would only take a few minutes before the server would blue screen. Here is the screen shot:

After thinking it was one vm, I created another one from scratch, again the same issue. I then created a new server and didn’t nlb it, and used it as a Dev box. After a couple hours of using it, all seemed well. Then I sent out a link for a couple people to test. The server blue screened shortly thereafter.

At this point, I opened a case with Microsoft Support. After a few hours of looking through the logs and sending over of memory dumps, they found a few other cases with the same basic setups and stop codes. Looking through the cases a private hotfix was in the works, and I would have to wait until Monday to hear from the developer that is working on it. (It was a weekend upgrade).

On Monday, I heard back from the developer and was approved to join the hotfix testers. This hotfix provided a test signed http.sys file for replacement in system32/drivers. After replacing the http.sys file, the vms in dev and qa haven’t blue screened yet (fingers crossed). I have been using the production wfes using host file entries to point only some traffic to them and they are performing as expected now as well. I hope to move more traffic onto them soon to get a good sense of their stability.

I have been spending some free time the last few weeks going over the Intranet migration project that we have been working for the last 9 months or so. I have pulled out some highlights of our project plan and stages, and will be presenting the whole process and the end result.

Here are some some time-line highlights:

Just over a year ago, I was handed a test desktop and the SharePoint Server 2007 administration book. Over the next three months we would convert the internal MIS staff site to SharePoint and get an understanding of what exactly the product does. Finally in February, we had our first meeting with our internal marketing staff, quality team, and MIS. The first production worthy server was allocated to the SharePoint project as well. In May, my role changed from being on the helpdesk to joining our Level 2 Internet Services team. Evaluation of our current intranet and related products continued through the summer. During this time a new member joined our team (Dan) fulfilling the much needed full time person to represent the editorial aspect and non-MIS view to the project. Meetings became more regular starting in August and the content and design conversations took full swing.

About this time more hardware was acquired and a majority of my time was spent working on a few solutions that SharePoint would immediately fill. New requests for workspaces and shared files were vetted against existing systems and what SharePoint could provide. A sort of “Alpha” test was used with these approved requests. Word of mouth about the tools that SharePoint offered brought some more requests and much needed feedback to the SharePoint team. The first official SharePoint feature rolled out was “advanced search”. The ability to index file systems and provide a search interface was a needed addition to the end user toolkit. It took awhile to find the data that we needed, schedule crawls and setup maintenance, but search was finally released in early November.

From August through (and after) our new intranet launch on Dec 16th, site content was migrated, updated, recreated, or removed (outdated). A key piece of the new Intranet is the MySite for customizable homepages. We integrated corporate content in one column of the MySite homepage, with a global nav bar, and gave the user the rest of the page to customize.

More details will be posted as I create and after the presentation so stay tuned, or come to the presentation. Link to the meetup and presentation information.

Posted with a few changes on our internal SharePoint blog.

Until today, the only way to capture information about your files was to create a subfolder inside of your network share to identify a common piece of information. Before you know it, you are 10 folders deep, can’t find your files, and Windows has a little rule that you can’t have more then 256 characters in the path AND filename.

The SharePoint platform has a solution for you. As you are creating your document libraries in your practice/client/personal sites think about taging your files rather then forcing them into a folder. Then you can filter and sort by multiple tags or create your own customized views of the files.

How do I do this (A user with Full Control to the library will need to do this)?

1. Open up your document library
2. Click settings and then create column
3. Insert a desciptive column name for your tag (client, project, etc) and then choose weither you would like it to be text or does the uploader need to choose from a list? Then click ok

Now when you upload you will have the option to insert a tag.

** If you choose to make the column required, it will not show to other members of the site until the uploader inserts a tag **, as the file will be in a draft “checked-out” state.

That’s great that I got it tagged, but how to i USE the tag?

There are multiple ways to use the tag:
You will be able to SEARCH for the tag using the search bar
When you are looking at the document library you can click on the column name to SORT by this column or you can FILTER by a particular value in the column
You can create VIEWS. A view can apply a predefined filter, sort and group by setting to your files.

***Note that this method only applies to new MySites***

Your first resource has to be the SharePoint Products and Technologies Blog at: http://blogs.msdn.com/sharepoint/archive/2007/03/22/customizing-moss-2007-my-sites-within-the-enterprise.aspx

Be sure to download the code from Codeplex at: http://www.codeplex.com/CKS/Release/ProjectReleases.aspx?ReleaseId=2824

Overview:
1. Copy the 2 .dlls from the solution file to the GAC
2. Copy MySiteStapler and MySiteStaplee to 12 Hive\templates\features
3. Install and activate features
stsadm -o installfeature -name MySiteStaplee
stsadm -o activatefeature -name MySiteStaplee -url http://hostname
stsadm -o installfeature -name MySiteStapler
4. Add the following to the web.config for you MySite WebApp:

<SafeControl Assembly=”MySiteCreatePart, Version=1.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=cb1bdc5f7817b18b” Namespace=”Microsoft.IW” TypeName=”*” Safe=”True” AllowRemoteDesigner=”True” />

Restart IIS after install and any updates to the feature files.

Sample MySiteStaplee.xml:

<WebParts>
  <WebPartAction>
    <assemblyName></assemblyName>
    <className></className>
    <zoneID></zoneID>
    <zoneIndex></zoneIndex>
    <typeName>Microsoft.SharePoint.Portal.WebControls.PersonalWelcomeWebPart</typeName>
    <Action>Delete</Action>
  </WebPartAction>
  <WebPartAction>
  <assemblyName></assemblyName>
  <className></className>
  <zoneID></zoneID>
  <zoneIndex></zoneIndex>
  <typeName>Microsoft.SharePoint.Portal.WebControls.RSSAggregatorWebPart</typeName>
  <Action>Delete</Action>
 </WebPartAction>
  <WebPartAction>
    <assemblyName>Microsoft.SharePoint, Version=12.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=71e9bce111e9429c</assemblyName>
    <className>Microsoft.SharePoint.WebPartPages.ContentEditorWebPart</className>
    <zoneID>MiddleLeftZone</zoneID>
    <zoneIndex>1</zoneIndex>
    <typeName></typeName>
    <Action>Add</Action>
    <Properties>
      <Property Key=”Title” Value=”Welcome to your My Site!”/>
      <Property Key=”ContentLink” Value=”http://hostname/welcometext.html”/>
    </Properties>
  </WebPartAction>

  <WebPartAction>
    <assemblyName></assemblyName>
    <className></className>
    <zoneID></zoneID>
    <zoneIndex></zoneIndex>
   <typeName>NewsGator.Enterprise.SharePoint.WebParts.Communities.NGMyCommunitiesWebPart</typeName>
    <Action>SetProperties</Action>
    <Properties>
      <Property Key=”Title” Value=”My Groups”/>
    </Properties>
  </WebPartAction>
  <WebPartAction>
    <assemblyName></assemblyName>
    <className></className>
    <zoneID>MiddleLeftZone</zoneID>
    <zoneIndex>5</zoneIndex>
    <typeName>NewsGator.Enterprise.SharePoint.WebParts.NGColleagueTrackerWebPart</typeName>
    <Action>Move</Action>
  </WebPartAction>
</WebParts>

There are two seperate steps:
1. Delete the site
stsadm -o deletesite -url http://hostname/personal/login

2. Remove the text in “Personal Site” on the SSP User profile details for the selected user.

Exporting a site with list information that needs to be captured and moved:

stsadm -o export -url http://hostname.domain.local/site/ -filename file.bak -includeusersecurity -versions 4

-includeusersecurity copies users permissions
-versions
1 – last major
2 – current version (major or minor)
3 – last major and minor
4 – all versions