Bringing the downloads in house

Most of the free E-books I’ve created over time have resided at http://www.slideshare.net/directorcia. The reasons for that are that I thought they’d get better indexed by Google and I didn’t need to commit storage from my site to saving them.

I was at a client’s recently and suggested they download a getting started with SharePoint document to follow along but it turns out that even though all my stuff is free to download you need to login to Facebook to do that. Boo, hiss….

So, in light of that fact I’ve now moved much of the material to a download page on my site which is here:

http://www.ciaops.com/downloads/

You should simply be able to click on any download listed there and get the information, much less friction. I’ll add more details about the information there over time but hopefully for the time being it is pretty obvious what each item is about. You’ll also find all the Need to Know podcasts there as well.

In future I’ll post my download on my site because you just can’t seem to trust anyone these days can you now?

Need to Know Podcast – Episode 5

I have just released the next CIAOPS Need to Know podcast (Episode 5) with Mark O’Shea from Microsoft Australia.

The details of the podcast are:

http://www.ciaops.com/n2k – Episode 5 = 42MB (45 mins)

or via direct download:

http://bit.ly/cia-n2k5

Mark and I chat about the Microsoft Partner Conference, SBS 7 and Aurora, Microsoft InTune and more.

So let me know what you think and if you are interested on being on the show please also contact me (director@ciaops.com) as I am always looking for people to talk about business and technology.

Stay tuned as there plenty of great episodes coming real soon.

Migration by the numbers – Step 3

Step 3 in a series of posts documenting the Microsoft SharePoint Foundation 2010 upgrade process on SBS 2008. This is based on the document:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=2dc66a0f-f840-4b29-93d3-13db70c85cba&;;displayLang=en

Step 3: Back up the existing data on your server

So before you launch into the migration process you should backup your data. Now, most people probably have a backup via SBS Backup or maybe some form of imaging tool, which is great, however it also a good idea to do a SharePoint backup. The reason for this is that if you need to you can always restore to an existing working SharePoint site (perhaps on another box). In the worst case this maybe on a virtual machine.

Before you go anywhere make sure you have enough space on the drive onto which you wish to save the backup. The default commands here will go to the C: drive but you can preface the file name with a drive and directory. So how much space are you going to need to backup your SharePoint site using these methods? Good question. To get an idea go to the location of the content databases in the filesystem (be default C:\Windows\SYSMSI\SSEE\MSSQL.2005\MSSQL\data) and look at the combined size of sharewebdb and sharewebdb_log as shown below:

if sharewebdb_log is really huge then take a look at this knowledge base article:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2000544

remember the amount of space you’ll need is roughly the combined size of both of these files.

According to the Microsoft document you need to go to the Command prompt as an administrator, then change to the directory:

C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\12\BIN

then type the following command (followed by ENTER)

stsadm -o export -url http://companyweb -filename companyweb.bak -includeusersecurity

Something like the following scroll past:

You should see that the process has completed successfully.

Now, what I would also do is another full backup of your site using the following command:

stsadm -o backup -url http://companyweb -filename companyweb2.bak

which should look something like:

Don’t forget when you use this command it will lock the site while completing the backup. This may interrupt users so probably best to schedule this out of production hours. Also keep in mind the time to complete both of these commands depends on the amount of data in your Companyweb site.

You should now have 2 backup files companyweb.bak and companyweb2.bak in the \bin directory.

The reason I’d recommend that is simply it is always good to have another backup and secondly this backup allows you to totally overwrite an existing site where as the previous export command combines sites. So if you do both you have more options which is what you want.

These commands are unfortunately going to do you no good unless you know how to use them to restore a site so I’d strongly recommend you do a restore of both methods to a test server (on virtual machine works well) if you have never done that before.

Migration by the numbers – Step 2

Step 2 in a series of posts documenting the Microsoft SharePoint Foundation 2010 upgrade process on SBS 2008. This is based on the document:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=2dc66a0f-f840-4b29-93d3-13db70c85cba&;;displayLang=en

Step 2: Run the pre-upgrade checker for SharePoint Foundation 2010

Select Start then right mouse click on Command Prompt and Select Run as administrator from the menu that appears.

Click Continue to accept User Access Control.

At the command prompt:

cd\program files\common files\microsoft shared\web server extensions\12\bin

and press ENTER to change to the SharePoint programs directory.

Now at the command prompt type:

stsadm –o preupgradecheck

and press ENTER to run.

You should now see something similar to that shown above as the command performs a number of checks and writes the results to a log file in the directory:

cd\program files\common files\microsoft shared\web server extensions\12\logs

When the process is complete you will be returned to the command prompt and a summary report will also be displayed in your browser like so:

It is very important to read ALL of this report, especially the last section.

The simple reason is that this report gives you a whole swag of information about your WSS v3 installation including what SharePoint features are present, database sizes, URL’s etc. It is especially important to note and rectify any errors or warnings before proceeding.

It is important to be aware that certain features (like Group board workspace) won’t work in SharePoint Foundation 2010 and should be removed prior to migration. You may also want to closely consider how to handle any of the custom templates that have been used with your site (here’s some guidance on the Fabulous 40 WSS v3 templates).

In summary this preupgradecheck function is going to save you a lot of heartache if you carefully consider what it is telling you and take appropriate action.

Migration by the numbers – Step 1

So here’s the first in a series of posts documenting the Microsoft SharePoint Foundation 2010 upgrade process on SBS 2008. This is based on the document:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=2dc66a0f-f840-4b29-93d3-13db70c85cba&;;displayLang=en

So download your copy boys and girls and follow the bouncing ball.

Step 1: Install Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 Service Pack 2 (SP2)

Before you rush out and apply the patch it is probably easiest to check to see whether it has already present. To do so, run the SharePoint Central Administration console on the SBS 2008 server via Start | Administrative Tools | SharePoint 3.0 Central Administration.

Select the Operations tab.

Then select the Servers in farm hyperlink under the Topology and Services section.

Look at the version number at the top of the page. If it is at least 12.0.0.6421 then it has WSS v3 SP2 already installed (at the time of writing the most recent version is probably 12.0.0.6539) and you can progress to the next step.

If the version number isn’t up to date then you’ll need to download and install:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyId=79BADA82-C13F-44C1-BDC1-D0447337051B&displaylang=en

Once installed check the version number again and ensure everything is functioning correctly with SharePoint.

Unable to import spreadsheet into SharePoint

SharePoint has a great feature that allows you to create a custom list directly from a spreadsheet. All you do simply tell SharePoint where the spreadsheet is located when you go to create the list.

However, you may also get this error if you are using a SharePoint that is hosted outside your business.

To overcome this simply go into your Internet Explorer Internet options and add the URL of the site that you are using to the Trusted Sites in the Security tab. That should now allow you to import the spreadsheet via the normal process.

Special characters in filenames

One of the biggest pains you find when migrating files to SharePoint is that it doesn’t like a number of special characters in filenames. These characters are typically:

~ ” # % & * : ? / \ { | }

which means when you attempt to copy them using Windows Explorer into SharePoint you’ll get an error and the copy process will terminate. This is a real pain because you then have to go through your existing file structure and locate the problem file, rename it and then start the copy again.

Trying to locate these files beforehand proved more difficult that I imagined using standard Windows commands. I did find a number of utilities on the net that did the job but I wanted something I could run from the command prompt that would simply record any offending files. In the end I commissioned someone to write a utility for me.

So all you have to do is run the utility at the command line and it will create a text file listing all the files with the default special characters listed above. The utility has also been created so that you can specify a list of characters to search for and it will use these. This means that you could use the utility to also locate files with specific characters in them, not just the ones listed above.

This utility is now freely available for all my SharePoint Operation Guide subscribers but if you aren’t get in contact with me (director@ciaops.com) and I’ll let you know what you need to do to obtain a copy.

Way out west

I have just released the next CIAOPS Need to Know podcast (Episode 4) with Peter Vane from IT West.

The details of the podcast are:

http://www.ciaops.com/n2k – Episode 4 = 51MB (55 mins)

or via direct download:

http://bit.ly/cia-n2k4

In this episode Peter and I discuss how the move to the cloud affects many aspects of IT including the MSP model, client perceptions and reseller business plans.

So let me know what you think and if you are interested on being on the show please also contact me (director@ciaops.com) as I am always looking for people to talk about business and technology.

Stay tuned as there plenty of great episodes coming real soon.