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Wading Through

Things related to MS Sharepoint


SharePoint RTM (SP0) standard support endingNovember 13

As of January 13, 2009, standard (mainstream) support for WSS 3.0 and SharePoint 2007 RTM (SP0) ends. This is part of the Microsoft Support Lifecycle for their products. Now, I won’t claim to be an expert in the MS Support model so I will just state my current understanding. If I find out more or different information, I will update this post.

You have two options if you wish to be able to continue to be to receive hotfixes (non-security) for problems you have:

  1. Either install Service Pack 1 (my recommended solution). You have to do this option if you want to submit a design change or feature request.
  2. Obtain an extended hotfix agreement, purchased within 90 days of mainstream support ending
   Tagged: Service Packs, SharePoint, Support, Updates   
Latest SharePoint Update PresentationNovember 13

It was great to be able to present for the KC Office Geeks. Thanks for having me out!

My presentation has been posted so you can download a copy. You can get it from my company’s Community page. It is the November 2008 presentation. I video recorded this presentation and will have the video available for download soon. I will post again when it is available.

Also, if you listened to the MOSS Gone Wild podcasts where I was a guest, this presentation has all the Microsoft Knowledge Base articles that I referenced.

   Tagged: KC Office Geeks, Service Packs, SharePoint, Updates   
Presenting in Kansas City on Thursday, November 6thOctober 21

I will be in KC on Thursday, November 6th for the Kansas City Office Geeks meeting to present on SharePoint Updates. They are a user group based out of Kansas City for people who work with Office Products, such as SharePoint, Access, Excel, InfoPath, etc. There is presentation information available on the Community page of my company’s web site with links to the group’s site:

http://www.hrizns.com/Pages/Community.aspx

They meet at Centriq Training at 8700 State Line Road, Ste 200, Leawood, KS, 66206 and the meeting starts at 5:45 p.m. Hope to see you there!

Here is the synoposis:

SharePoint Updates: The Tour Starts Here

JD will discuss the important aspects you will need to know to successfully deploy updates in your Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 or Office SharePoint Server 2007 environment. The presentation will provide an overview of the contents of SharePoint updates released (including the latest cumulative update and security patches), new “stsadm” commands enabled, and new functionality you can enable as needed. You will learn recommended additional actions you should take while upgrading as well as additional recommended updates to apply along the way. Finally, you will learn the step by step process for proper deployment as well as how to create a slipstream install to make future farm deployments and changes easier.

Look forward to get to talk


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