Tag: SharePoint

Oh dear Microsoft

Ever wondered why Microsoft Office 2007 documents didn’t seem to appear in the search results of Windows Sharepoint Services? Hmmm, turns out, according to Microsoft “This problem occurs because a 2007 Office IFilter is not installed“.

Is there a solution? Well yes and no. Yes in the fact that there is this KB article, and no in the fact that it involves installing Word and hacking the registry of the Sharepoint server. Now we’re not too sure whether this happens on EVERY Windows Sharepoint installation or just in some circumstances but we can tell you that if it does the solution is sure nasty.

I think that perhaps it is a good idea to wait a while until Microsoft releases a proper patch for this problem. In the meantime we’ll have to check to see whether all our Sharepoint sites are affected.

Search Server Express – first impressions

We have managed to get Search Server Express installed on a test Sharepoint machine and we admit that we are a little disappointed. Why? Well, we thought that Search Server would integrate directly with Sharepoint. It doesn’t. It basically creates a seperate (Sharepoint-like) site on the machine that is used purely for searching.
 
This means that the existing Sharepoint integrated search functionality stays as is (from what we see so far). However, the Search service does search the Sharepoint content directly and you can extend it to search things like web sites, file locations and public folders. This is where the real power of the application is going to come into its own.
 
Imagine setting up Search Server to crawl not only your Sharepoint but also every data on your server automatically! This will be a godsend to finally be able to locate all those documents strewn out across server hard disks.
 
Apart from this what we like so far about Search Server is the fact that it is easy to configure, simple to add crawling locations as well as perform maintenance tasks like launching a full crawl. The Search Server admin site has plenty of information about the searching status and configuration which was alwasy something that was hidden in Sharepoint.
 
So initially we were disappointed the it didn’t integrate directly with Sharepoint but the more we use it the more we like it. Can’t wait for the RTM version now.

Sharepoint Search Server Express

One of the really cool features of Sharepoint has always been its ability to search through all the content on your site. Now Windows Sharepoint Services (ie the free edition) did a great job but not as much as the full blown Microsoft Sharepoint Server (MOSS, ie not free). The MOSS product search had far more functiinality and things like “did you mean”, “sounds like” and so on.
 
Well now Microsoft are making a version of this Enterprise Search available for FREE yes FREE. It’s called Search Server 2008 Express and you can find out more info by clicking here.
 
It looks really good and should be an excellent add on to Windows Sharepoint Services, however on the initial reading we think it may have trouble if installed with Sharepoint 3 on SBS. We will confirm this as we are currently in the process of test the Release Candidate which you can download.
 
We’ll post more information about what we find soon.

SharePoint and Social Networking (Business)

My last post about Facebook was leading onto my thoughts of using SharePoint for social networking. Seems like the SharePoint team has beaten me to the punch with the following post on their blog.
 
Now I think that social networking is much easier using MOSS than it is Windows SharePoint Services but I still maintain that the fundamental reason Facebook is so popular is that it allows ‘non-geeks’ to create their own web pages and then have other contribute. I certainly feel that SharePoint could be used in a similar capacity if it given some thought.
 
The ability to easily create and link pages as well as save content is probably the greatest strength of SharePoint. Inside Saturn Alliance I use SharePoint extensively to capture all that information that either doesn’t get saved or ends up spread across many mediums. If I need something additional I just go in and create it. If I need to modify something I just go and modify and then boom it is up and working.
 
The power of the technology is not the product it is what it is capable of doing. People see the ability of networking with other in Facebook, to me, exactly the same is possible in Sharepoint.

Things should be back to normal now

Phew. Finally, our SharePoint sites should now be back to “normal”. Because we basically re-installed SharePoint on both servers we needs to add back the ability to index and search Adobe documents ( ie PDF’s).
 
By default SharePoint will do Microsoft files like Word and Excel but to index PDF’s then you have to install some software from Adobe, then make some configuration changes (read registry hacks) and finally do a full re-index of the site to incorporate all the existing PDF information in SharePoint.
 
We have now completed all those steps so this SharePoint ( http://supportweb.ciaops.net.au ) and our internal SharePoint site should now be back to exactly the point before the application of the recent patch.
 
In thanks I’d like to offer a quick prayer : Our Father who aren’t in heaven, please don’t let this happen again. PLEASE.

Lessons learnt from recent SharePoint crash

Here’s a bit of retrospective of what we learn’t after teh recent Sharepoint issues:
 
1. Don’t be adventurous with patches, let some other poor smuck find the problem first. Wait at least 7 days before applying any patch to a system and make sure that you keep across other keep people in the industry like Wayne, Vlad and Susan (to name but a few). THese people are likley to find the problem first or have others come to them.
 
2. Make sure that you have a backup and the backup works. We have 2 backups, one is a full server backup using NT backup and the second is a Sharepoint data backup using STSADM. The full backup failed to restore TWICE so we had to revert to the Sharepoint backup. Problem with this is that it takes time to build up a suitable machine onto which you can recover Sharepoint ( Service Packs, Templates and the like). Since most of our Sharepoint stuff is virtualized we will ensure that we have a more up to date backup machine ready in the future. It is also probably a good idea to take an image of the server regularly using something like ShadowProtect. This means in the event of a disaster you can at least roll back to a previous point pretty quickly.
 
3. Realise the point at which you need to call Microsoft Product Support is probably much earlier than you think. If you don’t work with thi stuff day and day out then a call to PSS could have you potentially hours and hours of wasted time. If you don’t have access to PSS then again consult others in the community since they are all usually most willing to help. Also, keep in mind that it may take a while for any support to actually get hands onto the problem. In our case it took 24 hours, which was frustrating but in th end we were more than happy with the result.
 
4. All our Sharepoint sites (both internally and externally) DON’T run on SBS. Why? Well, we reckon SBS is the heart of our network and doesn’t need to be strained with additional load when we can achieve the same result using other means (read – user Virtual PC). If Sharepoint had been on our SBS it would have caused an even more major distruption. Since it wasn’t we could focus on other things while working independently on the Sharepoint issue. We acknowledge that in some places this is not possible but if you can, generally host Sharepoint somewhere else on the network.
 
5 Understand the fact that if Sharepoint or IIS is down you can’t access ANY of your data! Let me repeat that ANY OF YOUR DATA. This is a single point of failure and admittedly fairly unique but if your business DEPENDS on Sharepoint day in and day out then you need to take steps to reduce the downtime or otherwise you’ll have plenty of staff twiddling their thumbs.
 
If we think of more we’ll post but hopefully everything is now looking ok.

The day you don’t read other people’s blogs

This week was Microsoft’s usual patch Tuesday. In the swag of updates was one for Sharepoint KB934525. Foolishly we installed that on both our internal and external Sharepoint site and broke both of them.
 
If we had read Wayne’s blog entry or Vlad’s then at least we would have been aware of the potential problem and chosen not to install the patch. Typically, we applied the patch before check our RSS reader and got burned.
 
After some initial too and frowing we tried Vlad’s suggested fix but that didn’t solve the issue. Seems that the reason for this was because we had installed the Sharepoint Groupboard that also caused problems.
 
Ok now things are getting serious with our two production Sharepoint sites down, time to call Microsoft Product Support. Now as a certified partner we were disappointed with the slow response to the issue. It took a whole day before we got anyone from Microsoft to get ‘hands-on’ with our problems.
 
In the meantime we attempted to do complete server restore of our internal Sharepoint site (since we have backups) and that failed (twice). The server restored but we got all sorts fo wierd errors. So not wanting to waste more time on that we built a new server and did a Sharepoint data restore (since we backup Sharepoint data as well seperately). A day later we had our internal Sharepoint working again just a Microsoft started working on our external Sharepoint site.
 
While Microsoft continued to work on the server in background we started the process of building yet another server in case we needed to do another Sharepoint restore for our extenal site. Watching the process that the Microsoft Tech had to go through there was NO WAY we would have ever been able to recover from the problems ourselves.
 
Anyway, after a full two days we finally had both Sharepoint sites working. After an initial frustration at waiting for service we have nothing but praise for our Microsoft Tech who stayed on the job and keep us up to date and then hung around after we left for the day to make sure it was all working after hours.
 
There are still a few bugs to iron out in the recovered site but as you can see (if you are reading this) then the site is operational. We’ll post again shortly with some lesson learned about this experience but all we can say about KB934525 is DON’T DO IT unless you know that it may TOTALLY BREAK Sharepoint V3.0!