Toluu : Wading Through

Wading Through

Things related to MS Sharepoint

Justin Jackson and Todd Kitta are wonderful and allowed me to be a guest on their new Sharepoint podcast: MOSS Gone Wild. In Episode 4, we sat down and talked about the steps you should be taking when you are applying SharePoint patches. In Episode 5 (to be published soon), we talked about the contents of the SharePoint updates since the RTM release.

Please feel free to post comments/questions either here or at their web site.

2nd Stage Recycle Bin FallacyJune 12

In the SharePoint community, I regularly hear a statement made that I myself use to believe was correct but I want to clear up the misconception. It is easy to understand why people believe this based on unclear wording in Central Administration.

The statement is made that if you do not set site quotas for the site collection, then your second stage (site collection) recycle bin will never be emptied because the second stage recycle bin is based on a percentage of the site quota. Therefore, your second stage recycle bin can grow uncontrollably because it will never be emptied. This reasoning is incorrect because it is based on some misinformation.

So lets clear up how the recycle bin works including the second stage. I will first explain how it works. Then link to documentation and provide tips if you wish to test this statement yourself.

In Central Admin, you can state the numbers of days items are to be retained in the Recycle Bin. The first stage and the second stage (site collection) are BOTH part of the Recycle Bin. Therefore, items in either the first stage OR the second stage will be deleted after the number of days set for the web application. However, an additional size limit can be placed on the second stage recycle bin by using a percentage of the site collection quota to limit it.

Therefore, I am still recommending that you set site quotas. Without site quotas, there is nothing to stop your second stage recy

Data View Web Part, Web Services, & AAMs…oh myMay 21

We had some developers wanting to use a Data View Web Part (DVWP) in a site and access information through a web service on the internet. They were able to connect to the web service WSDL but when they went to Show Data, they would receive the following error:

“The server returned a non-specific error when trying to get data from the data source. Check the format and content of your query and try again. If the problem persists, contact the server administrator.”

Well, the problem did persist, so they contacted us as instructed. :) We spent quite a bit of time troubeshooting the issue. After lots of getting no where, we realized we weren’t in Kansas anymore (actually Missouri) so we opened a case with MS CSS. After several weeks, it was determined that is a bug and there was a work around. I am not seen any KB articles with this information so I wanted to review the exact setup that causes the issue, why it is broken, and how to work around it as learned from CSS.

First the setup that causes this issue.

You have a standard web application setup with a url in the default zone, for our example, we will use http://default.mycompany.com.
You add an additional URL for the web application through the use of alternate access mappings (AAM) to provide access to the same content through a different URL. For our example, we will use http://intranet.mycompany.com. In this case, you do NOT extend the web application. You o

SharePoint 2007 SP1 Deployment Tips PresentationMay 13

It was great to be able to present this topic at the St. Louis SharePoint Users Group. Everyone seemed to stay engaged and had questions along the way. Please feel free to provide feedback in the comments section if you were at the presentation.

The presentation can be downloaded from the Horizons Consulting, Inc. Downloads area.

If you have questions about your SharePoint 2007 SP1 deployment or the presentation, please leave them in the comments section below.

Backup Content Databases-The Right WayApril 16

So running an stsadm command to backup a content database is not difficult in a WSS 3.0 or SharePoint 2007 environment. However, there are some other additional steps you should take when doing these backups which I have outlined here.

1. Run “stsadm -o setsitelock” with the “-lock” parameter of either ”readonly” or “noaccess”
This ensures no changes are made to the database while backing it up.

2. Run “stsadm -o preparetomove”
This breaks the relationship between the database and the SSP. This allows a new/updated relationship to be established with this database and any SSP, as needed, when it is restored. This allows you to avoid the dreaded error message “Failure to synch web application <guid>: A duplicate site ID…”

3. Run “stsadm -o backup”
No explanation needed.

4. Run “stsadm -o sitelock” with the “-lock” parameter of “none”
This removes all locks on the database after the backup so changes can be made again.

Please see TechNet or “stsadm -help” for detailed instructions on all parameters needed to run these commands.

UPDATE (May 2008): If you would like more information about why I make the recommendation about preparetomove or you are having the sync issue and need a way to resolve, see this blog post.