Integrate Project Server with MOSS and SSP

If you are going to integrate Project Server 2007 with MOSS, you may want to use a seperated Shared Services Provider to host it.

During our pre-migration testing, we setup an integrated Project Server 2007 and move databases from the pilot environment. Couple days later the entire project server crashed and we had no clue why it happened.

After we discussed the whole situation with Microsoft, we were told die to the nature of Project Server, we should use a separated SSP to host.

Since we already created a SSP for the entire MOSS farm, the process included:

• Create two new SSPs.
• Move portal, mysite, search and indexing to one of the new SSPs.
• Create PWA under the 2nd new SSPs.
• Other than hosting PWA, do not use the 2nd SSP to do profile importing, content crawling or any other services if it's not required.

We implemented suggested settings to our server farm and so far so good. If you plan to do so, I will recommend to find a development/staging environment and document all the steps to create these two SSPs for your MOSS environment.

Happy Holiday

Still hard to believe it's the end of 2008. I feel that I just mailed our 2007 X'mas card yesterday.

This is a pretty busy year to me. I moved to a new job and do not have to face some unpleasant situation. I had my first SharePoint speech at the conference earlier this year. I also had chance to meet several SharePoint experts face to face.

Wish everyone a happy holiday and new year.

Move on to a new position

Since late July I was moved to (long story) an external government contract. I was kind getting the messages and started looking around.

Fortunately, I received a good offer to work on over all MOSS and Project Server architect, deployment and development. So I moved on to the new one starting Thanksgiving week. Pretty exciting and looking forward to learn lots new knowledge.

Happy Thanksgiving.

Access is denied when I schedule content crawling

I worked on the search crawling schedule in a server farm and received an error message like:

Access is denied (Exception from HRESULT:....)

However, I was able to start a manual content crawling without difficulties. So what happened?

Microsoft has a KB article to explain this situation and the link is:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/926959. I was glad to find out a solution so quick. But then I wondered, which server I should apply this change to?

Since the environment I deployed has separated front-ends, index and query servers and this article and other web site did not give me clear direction.

After I analyzed the situation and found out I should apply this to the index server, since index server is the one performing this scheduled task.

I followed the KB article and made changes to the index server, everything worked as it should be.

Perhaps next time when we publish some thoughts or instructions and we are using a server farm, includes which server we apply changes to fix the problems may be very help.

Just a thought.

SharePoint Best Practice Conference - washington DC

If you knew the new SharePoint Best Practice book by Ben and Bills, this is kind like a extension to the book and concepts.

There are lots talks regarding how great SharePoint can do technology wise, how about the business needs? How about a good start to deploy it? What do we, as a technical person to work on this product, miss and could learn from other experts?

Here is the web site for more details. Looking forward to hear any opinions.

Deployed a Large Server Farm Today

Today is a good day to me since I worked with our client to finish 2 days server farm deployment.

We have 8 servers in this farm: two web front end, one index server, one query server, one project server, one Excel service server and two SQL clustered server.

I joked to my client that I will bump my head to the wall three times since I misunderstood that we have to use Kerberos to deploy a farm like this. So today's reault gave me one good and one bad thing:

1. It approved that I was wrong and I learned from it with well documented steps.

2. I have to find out why my previous test deployment failed with authentication errors,which definitely has nothing to do with Kerberos.

I will put my experience here since I believe some points should be cleared.

This is definitely a good feeling to enjoy the whole weekend after some unpleasant issues, especially I learned more today.

Infrastructure Update for Microsoft Office Servers

Microsoft recently released a new update targeting Office Servers, including MOSS and WSS 3.

One of the feeture I was looking for answers was Federated Search. In the description of this update, Microsoft added this functionality to MOSS's search features. This makes me pretty exciting to know and want to try ASAP.

The details of the update can be found here:
Install the Infrastructure Update for Microsoft Office Servers (Office SharePoint Server 2007)

Description of the Microsoft Office Servers Infrastructure Update: July 15, 2008

Issues that are fixed in Microsoft Office Servers by the Microsoft Office Servers Infrastructure Update

I will add more infromation and reactions from the community later.

Have fun.

Book: SharePoint 2007 Best Pracrice

This is the latest book from Bill English. Click here to find more details on Amazon.

The End of SharePoint Conference

Yes, it ended on Saturday and today is Sunday. I was exhausted after I came back and barely finished my dinner.

It went very well yesterday. Vanessa Williams (not the one you saw on TV) gave her key note speech regarding her experience to implement SharePoint. You may want to check her blog for more information.

Then I joined the session of lessons learned from an administrator but had to leave early to setup my machine for my presentation. Brian Whipple from PHE gave us his experience from a PM prospective. Then I presented some simple, no code ideas to use customized workflows to automate some business process. It was a great experience and I had everyone out for lunch On Time !

After lunch, I joined The Importance of Taxonomy for SharePoint Deployments session and hooked with the speaker Mack Sigman. I told him I would like to get more story from him and those have nothing to do with IT or SharePoint. He was in the US Navy and I would like to write some story if it is possible.

I sat in shortly in the next two sessions since the topics changed and I had chances to chat with others. At the end, we presented the check to Children Miracle Network and back on the road driving.

According to Gary, the next conference is November 7th and 8th 2008. If you missed this one, come join us and share your experience together.

First Day of SharePoint Conference

Today is the first day of Northern Virginia Regional SharePoint Conference at Dulles Holiday Inn. There were more vendors there, more people there, more speakers (including myself) and more tracks. Cool day.

There were three tracks for Developers, Administrators or Managers. I followed the developer track though I haven't done any heavy weight coding for a while. However, this is a better way (at least to myself) to learn ideas from others, not necessary has to be done with coding.

Ed Hild expanded his using workflows to do site provision and it was one of the topic made my eye opened. This was the third time he talked about the same topics and he added lots more than I expected. Especially he used event handler and out-of-box approval workflow to do the same thing without deploy a VS.Net workflow. I also like ed's style a lot. He has the whole thing on his blog, go check it out.

Also exciting was met some people from a training more than two years and exchange ideas. This is a very long day (from 7 AM to almost 6 PM) but very good one.

I am going to have a short speech to present some no-codes workflow examples tomorrow. If you are coming, join us and have fun.

See ya!

Microsoft SharePoint Developer Site

Microsoft just announced their latest SharePoint development resource web site: Microsoft SharePoint Developer Site.

I haven't really explore the whole site but you will be able to find vidoes, whait papaers, demo and other things.

Enjoy the site.

Visual Studio extensions for WSS V 1.2 is Available

The Version 1.2 of Visual Studio extensions for WSS is now available for download. You can find the file here.

This is the first version of VsWSS to support Visual Studio .Net 2008 and only 2008.

If you are using 2005, then do not install this version.

Enjoy it.

How to Move Customized Workflow Between Sites

If you have been using SharePoint Designer 2007 to develop customized workflow, you may already know the official documentations told us we could not re-deploy it to another site. If you are working in a development environment, it would be pretty hard to recreate the same workflow with lots If loops and conditions.

So, what can you do? I will show you how to move your workflow from site to site or, server to server.

After you complete workflow development and testing and ready to move, go to the list setting pages and save this list as a template.

In the save page, remember to save it with contents. Yes, workflow is part of the contents and can be saved into the template file.

Move the template to the site or sever you like to use. Create the list from the template to the new site.

If your design includes other lists to save history or interact with this new list, remember to create them to the same new site.

Once you are ready with all the creation, open the site with SharePoint Designer. Open the workflow and check the list name is shown correctly or you only see the GUID number.

This extra step is especially important when you create the new list with a different name. Make changes to the list name and update the workflow.

Now you should be able to use the workflow now.

Enjoy it.

Good Article About How to Imstall MOSS SP1

SP1 for MOSS and WSS have been out for a while. I recently implemented to a virtual environment very close to the production system and under testing. Microsoft released lots information for any of you out there to read (after you finish all the SharePoint blogs, tips, technical info and codes).

If you do not have time to finish the documents and you have a simple environment, then Shane Yang published a very clear article to guide you through the installation. Read it before you start and you should be fine.

Remember, you have to install SP1 for WSS first, do not run configuration wizard and the install SP1 for MOSS. I heard some one only installed MOSS SP1 and had to re-build the virtual server. So, read it before you start.

Enjoy it.

2008 Summer Regional SharePoint Conference

SharePoint User Group of NoVA is going to have the 2nd regional SharePoint conference from June 27 to 28 (Friday and Saturday) at Holiday Inn, Washington Dulles.

Last conference was small but very successful. If you are leaving in or close to great Washington DC area, don't miss this good opportunity to learn and share your information and experience.

The details of it are here.

Did I mention, compare to other conference, this is very inexpensive one.

Hopefully I can see you there.

Steps to Configure MOSS 2007 Server Farm

Jose Barreto wrote a good and simple list of steps to perform basic configuration of MOSS server farm. If you need something as quick reference, his article may be very handy sometime.

His article is here.

Office can't open files from MOSS and Crashed

When you clicked on a document link on a MOSS/WSS 3 site and received an error message, then your browser crashed. You tried it again, it happened. You rebooted and tried, it crashed. So, what happened?

If you have any components of Office 2003 and 2007 installed on the crashed machine, this could happen. What I mean any components? For example, you have Office 2003 suite and SharePoint Designer 2007 or Office 2007 suite and Project 2003 installed together. This issue may happened to any PC with OS other than XP SP2 and browser other than IE 7, but so far I only had chance to test under this environment.

When a patch targeting either Office 2003 and/or 2007 installed, you may have this issue. So, what can you do?

Don't worry and do not uninstall anything. Open your Control Panel and find Add/Remove Programs. Find Office 2003 components installed and choose a Repair Installation (if you do not see this option, do not uninstall it unless you can not resolve this issue).

Then find Office 2007 components and do the same thing, Repair Installation. it will require you to reboot you machine. After that, you should be able to open the document links as before.

If not, you have to do more testing. So far I can resolve this issue with these steps I just mentioned.

Change Automatic Update on the SharePoint Server

This may not look like a good idea to some system or network administrators due to the security concerns. However, any patches installed to your SharePoint server may bring up issues that give you errors in the even log every couple minutes. The worst thing could happen other than your server explode or transform into a robot is, of course, stop working as you expected.



I have read people from the on-line communities talking about how an installed patch brought down the server or made certain features stop functioning as before.



If your environment does not have a centralize system or process to evaluate the updates sent by Microsoft, change the update service from install to download and notify you instead. You will have chances to review them and stop any potential problems before you are certain.

Two tips to install SharePoint

Since last summer I have spent some time to answer questions on a web site to help others with SharePoint. Some of the problems or questions I came across were pretty common: web site broken after update installed and server account stopped working.

Especially for those who was using Small Business Server (SBS), it happened more often than regular Windows 2003 implementation.

So, here are two tips for you if you would like to learn or start SharePoint (WSS, 2003 or MOSS 2007) installation:

1. Do not use the Default Web Site in your IIS. Especially if you are sharing a server with other applications. You may break other application or vice versa. Create another web application and use it for your SharePoint sites. This has nothing to do with using port 80.

2. Remember to use real user accounts to install and configure your SharePoint and/or database. If the environment is under a domain, use domain user accounts. If it attaches to a workgroup, use real user accounts. Do not use any machine or system service accounts in your application pools, search and indexing services.

Enjoy your trip with SharePoint.