Completed 70-631 – Windows SharePoint Services 3.0, Configuring

Well we are happy to announce that we have just passed this exam from Microsoft. Yeah, this means that we are now a Microsoft Certified SharePoint Professional (we believe that’s what it’s called anyway).

A while back we were never really keen on the whole Microsoft Certified Professional thing but since completing the Small Business Specialist certification we must admit that we have come around a little. In this day and age you really to have as many points of differentiation as you can between you and your competitors. Although we don’t necessarily believe that having Microsoft certifications makes you any better or any worse at least it show that you have jumped a few hurdles and passed some exams. That in some way does show that you are willing to go that little bit extra to improve your business knowledge.

So what do you need to know if you want to pass the exam? Well we would suggest that you spend a little time learning the basics of Windows load balancing. Why? We suppose that it is because in many instances SharePoint will be installed on multiple servers and in this case there is going to be a need for resource sharing and optimization. So spend a little time learning the basics about Windows Load Balancing. Also, ensure that you know how to configure SharePoint via the Central Administration site. Would also suggest that you spend a little time understanding the role of IIS in SharePoint, i.e. application pools, web sites, SSL and what not. You don’t need to know low level nitty gritty stuff but you need to have a good general understanding as well as the role these play with SharePoint. Also, if you are from the normal one server world of SBS then you’ll have to broaden your horizon and learn how SharePoint functions with multiple servers ( front ends, content servers and so on). Again, not difficult but Sharepoint DOES operation on more than a single server.

Microsoft has some good online learning courses at www.microsoftelearning.com. We would recommend :

Collection 5403: Implementing Microsoft Windows Sharepoint Services 3.0

Which includes 6 sub courses that will cover everything you need to pass exam 70-631. As for reading material we would recommend :

Microsoft Office Sharepoint Server 2007 Administrator’s Companion

Which is a little more focused on MOSS than Windows Sharepoint but is still a pretty good book. We’ll have a full review here soon.

In summary, if you have set up a few Sharepoint 3.0 sites, done so research into Sharepoint and if you then brush up on Network Load Balancing and IIS you should be able to pass the exam, just like us !

SBS 2003 Installation Part 4 video

We have now released the fourth part in our series of installing Small Business Server 2003 R2. This video covers the installation of the R2 technologies onto SBS 2003. The R2 technologies include applications like Windows Server Update Services 2.0.

You will find our video by clicking here.

If you find our videos at all beneficial we ask you to consider supporting us directly by making a donation via http://donation.saturnalliance.com.au. All donations allow us to devote more resources to the content we provide as well as improving its quality.

Comments about the SBS community

There has been plenty of talk about the whole SBS community lately. Vlad has certainly stirred the pot with some recent posts ( and here ) and to a large amount we have to agree with what he says. Why? Well, it certainly appears to us that the great majority of people in SBS land are takers not givers. There are very small number of regular contributors to the “community” while the rest tend to sit on their duff and simply suck in the information. Given that we all only have a limited time in every day we acknowledge that there is also way too much information out there for any of us to get across but hey the least you could do is say “thank you”.

Case in point. We developed a survey on our Supportweb site that was designed to try to get a feel for some basics of the SBS installs out there. We posted a request for people to complete the survey to our local SBS User Group and we were luck to get 10 responses! We then contacted Susan Bradley who was kind enough to post the survey information on her blog and to date our total number os respondants is 45! C’mon people, only 45 people in the whole SBS world have the time to respnd to a survey? This apathy is mirrored in the offical SBS Community survey, which apparently hasn’t had very many respondants either. It just goes to show to us that the vast majority of the so-call SBS community in fact are takers not givers.

When we used to attend our local SBS user group meetings we found that we were just generally getting pumped for information. How do you do this? Should I install that? How do I go about this? Now, generally we don’t mind helping people at all but of late we found that is all we have been doing and worse still we never received any genuine thanks for our contributions. We are happy to help were we can but we feel it isn’t very smart to keep giving and giving when nothing is forthcoming in return. In that case we are just being stupid by letting ourselves being taken advantage of. Why should we get up and give presentations and provide advice, that in many cases has taken us plenty of hard struggle to learn, to people who simply take it, without thanks or making any contribution in return, and then implement in their business for their own commercial benefit?

So now we look at the so called “community” as a case of “well, how is this going to help our business?”. We continue to develop and post free material for the community (our videos being a case in point) but we are now asking for donations to provide us with some business benefit for our efforts. No doubt we will called all sorts of names for seeking commercial gain but you aren’t required to pay to see the videos, it is a simply way to show us your appreciation of the efforts we have made in providing the material. If support isn’t forthcoming then we’ll look at channelling these efforts into another project that provides us business benefit, because if we don’t we go out of business. Amazingly, when we started creating these videos we got all sorts of people want “free” support on some of the technologies we highlighted. Initially we provided support but after a while (and with very little thanks for for our efforts) we are reverting to the commercial model. If you want “free” support then make a donation to show us that you are not just a taker, because we aren’t willing to continue to be taken advantage of.

Now, there is little doubt that this rant won’t go much further than this blog since we doubt very few people even read it (hi mom), but at least we have made our opinions public and attempted to explain our motives. Of all the information we have is placed on the web, much of it free of charge, it would be nice to now and again get a sincere “thank you” rather than “this content is so basic even my grandmother would have known that”. Fair enough, we are happy to take any form of feedback on what we create but so far that “grandmother” crack has been about the total extent of it.

As we said, we appreciate that there are far more knowledgable people in the “SBS community” providing a far greater range of helpful material but it would be nice once in a while to actually know that someone out there does appreciate what you are providing to the community for “free”.

Support for SBS 2003 without service pack ceasing

Please note that support for SBS 2003 SP 0, also known as SBS 2003 RTM, will be retired on July 10, 2007. For more information see : http://support.microsoft.com/gp/lifesupsps.

It has now been over 3 years since SBS 2003 first came out so if your product is not current then it is strongly recommended that you upgrade or install SBS SP1.

SBS 2003 Installation Part 5 video

Part 5 in our series of installing Small Business Server 2003 R2 is now on YouTube. Simply click here to view it. This video deals with connecting Small Business Server to the Internet by running the standar Connect to the Internet Wizard. Remember, that will all SBS configuration you should always run the wizard if there is one available.

SBS Backup failure – Error in log 0x800710d8 Gettapemediapoolname failed

So we saw this on an SBS 2003 R2 Premium machine that had been up for a long time. When we did some Googling we came across the following article which we figured would be required, http://www.taznetworks.com/rss/2006/01/sbs-backup-error-code-0x800710d8.html . Simple easy, with just a few server reboots.

When we examined the server more closely we discovered that it had the well known SQL memory issue that SBS seems to suffer from on the MS Firewall service. What happens here is that you see an sqlsever instance consuming a huge amount of RAM. When you look closer at the source of the instance you find it is the ISA 2004 reporting database. You can find more information about the solution to that here but basically you need to run the command line WMSDE tools to limit the amount of memory the WMSDE instance uses (WMSDE is the cut down version of SQL you get for free). So we did that since the server couldn’t be rebooted and low and behold the backup the following day worked!

So it would seem that not only is the backup error 0x800710d8 potentially related to a corrupt RSM database but it is dependent on the memory in use on your server. So before you go recreating your RSM database try seeing whether your server maybe consuming an inordinate amount of RAM. If it is try throttling some of the SQL instances as detailed above or like most things, maybe a simple reboot to free up memory again will do the job.

Advanced Virtual PC video

We have posted a new video that cover some of the more advanced features of Microsoft Virtual PC. We cover features such as virtual machine additions, virtual hard disk compacting as well as creating differencing virtual hard disks. You’ll find the video by clicking here. As always we welcome any feedback or suggestions you may have for us about our video creations as we are always trying to develop material that is beneficial to people.