SharePoint alerts stop working when you add a new web front-end server to the farm

SharePoint alerts is a very useful user notification service. It is heavily relying on out-going email configuration. There are many on-line articles talk about how to setup out-going email services and troubleshoot alerts issues. Today, I would like to share a different scenario I had when alerts were not working properly.

We have a SharePoint farm and alerts have been working properly for years. In the past few months, we were in the process to add a new web front-end server to replace the current one, not doing load balancing (regarding this decision, it is another story).

It took sometime to install and configure the new server to make it ready to join the farm. After I ran the configuration wizard, I noticed that some of the immediate alerts stopped working. However, I still received daily and weekly summary alerts and emails sent by workflows were fine.

Obviously, out-going email service and configuration was working OK, otherwise I would not receive any emails from SharePoint. Alerts did not stop working entirely, only immediate alerts were stopped. Nevertheless, it did show that this problem has something to do with the new server.

When I checked the server events, I did see errors regarding "cannot connect to the SMTP mail server". At the time I saw these errors, the new server were not opening to end users and I was the only one using local Hosts file to gain access to SharePoint. The in-coming email service was running fine on the old web front-end server and I did not install SMTP components to the new server. There was only one service running on the new server, which is the SharePoint foundation web application service to allow users to access SharePoint sites and content.

No changes were made to either email, Exchange or alerts configuration and this service has been running fine for years from the existing web front-end one. I knew the new one could not connect to the email host, but the old one should and why alerts stopped working?

After some research, I thought perhaps SharePoint needed everyone on the same page, otherwise services would stop working even though one of the servers in the farm was capable doing that. In order to eliminate this possibility, I added the new server to the Exchange anonymous relay list. I added the old web front-end server to it when I established the farm. Few minutes after the new server is added, immediate alerts started working. The email host connection errors were gone and everything went back to normal.

So, it did not occurred to me that SharePoint is working like a gang: you don't go and we don't go. :) Even though other servers could handle alerts, SharePoint did not want leave one of them behind and decided not to functioning as it should be. 

Lessons learned.

SharePoint User Profile Services and Different Domain Names

If your environment has User Profile Service, have you noticed that whether all users are under the same domain? In our case, we were not and it created other issues when we want to use profile data. For example, when we want to query a user profile data, we don't know which domain this user was mapping to and it is hard to predict. In order to fix this problem, we have to fix this problem and have all users under the same Net BIOS domain name.

There are articles to show you how to do it. For example, you can find steps from this blog: http://tremblayse.wordpress.com/2011/10/17/ups-and-netbios-domain-name-different-then-fqdn-domain-name/. Since there are enough information on-line already, I would like to just mention our experience when we perform this change.

1. Make sure you have tested it in a non-production environment and document all your steps. This is very important to help you when you implement it in your production environment.
2. We have User Profile Service been running for a while. Some articles mentioned that you may want to delete it first. From my opinion, you don't have to, especially if your environment has large number of users or they have updated/added information to their profiles.
3. Before you start making changes, make sure both services are running. If you are not sure their status, you may want to go to the Central Administration site and restart both of them, one at a time.
4. After using PowerShell to enable NetBiosDomainNamesEnabled attribute, run the command with "True" to confirm it is up and running.
5. Reset IIS and restart timer job services. I did not do it in the test environment but had to do it in production one.
6. Some article mentioned that you can delete the profile sync connection before you executing the PowerSheel command. I did not do this first and you may want consider to delete it first. However, make sure you have a screen shot of the connection settings page before you delete it.
7. When you delete the connection and failed, don't panic and just restart both profile services again from the Central Administration site. Try to delete the connection again. If it is not there after you restart both services, you are fine.
8. After the new connection is created, run full sync once and give it several night to verify the number of users are imported. If the number does not seem to be right, make sure you have selected all OUs that have users. Rerun full sync if necessary.

The whole process may take over night to import and re-process all profile data. When it is done, you should be able to find all users are mapping to the Net BIOS domain name.

Hope this will help you to go through the changes smoother.

SharePoint Conference in the USA in Year 2010

These are the SharePoint conferences in the USA I know so far:

The SharePoint Technology Conference
2/10 -2/12
San Francisco
http://sptechcon.com/


Microsoft Teched North America 2010
6/7 – 6/10
New Orleans, LA
http://northamerica.msteched.com/?CR_CC=100280255&WT.srch=1&CR_SCC=100280255&WT.srch=1

SharePoint.org Conference
4/18 – 4/21
Baltimore, MD
http://www.sharepointconference.org/Pages/default.aspx

The Experts Conference
4/25 – 4/28
Los Angeles
http://www.tec2010.com/

Best Practice Conference
8/24 – 8/27
Washington DC
http://www.bestpracticesconference.com/?gclid=CKGBwIKcx5QCFQ2L1QodLlYVkQ

Where to find the thrid site collection administrator?

When either the server or site collection administrator (depends on you have self-service turn on or not) creates a new site collection, the administrator has two field to enter at least the primary site collection administrator. This information is saved in the OwnerID and SecondaryContactID.

After the site collection is created, the site collection administrator is able to remove, change or add more than two site collection administrators to the list. If you remove a name from the list, MOSS will remove it from one of the column. When you add the same name back, or add the 2nd administrator to the list, you will not see the column updated by the system.

On the other hand, since there are just two columns, where the setting is saved if you add another administrator?

This is actually what happened when you make changes to the site collection administrator list:

1. When you add up to two names to the fields during site collection creation, both names are saved in the Sites table.
2. When you remove anyone from the list after the site collection is created, MOSS will remove it from the Sites table.
3. If you add a new name, no matter this is the 2nd , 3rd or more, MOSS will not update the Sites table.
4. All the changes made to the site collection administrator list go to UserInfo table. There is a column called SiteAdmin and this is the place you can do your search.

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.

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.

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.