Denis Heliszkowski's Blog

Are you a scripting fan ?

2008-11-27T12:12:00Z

Well if you are... You are not alone !

Actually scripted Sharepoint installations have been discussed in the past, and are a very helpful way for deploying large farms.

We have published a new white paper on that, It provides very good information that will help you build your own scripts.

It can be found at: http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=135694

Improved Update Deployment Documents

2008-11-17T05:24:00Z

One of the biggest challenges we have had is providing customers with reliable and well organized documentation for updating their servers with the latest update including install sequence to get an RTM server to the latest version.

In the latest refresh of the documents we have made substantial improvements to make the documents more usable and easier to read. As we move forward with future cumulative updates and service packs we will continue to take feedback and update the documents to make them better.

Note: These links remain the same as previously published so if you already have them as favorites then you are already set.

Deploy software updates for Windows SharePoint Services 3.0

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc288269.aspx

Deploy software updates for Office SharePoint Server 2007

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc263467.aspx

Microsoft SharePoint Administration Toolkit 1.0 Released

2008-04-30T21:03:00Z

This is the first version of the Admin Toolkit. The idea is to put in place a mechanism to release supported, documented, and sustained tools for SharePoint.

The plan is to release an updated toolkit quarterly which will include tools to address top support issues or design deficiencies that are a hindrance for product use.

The Microsoft SharePoint Administration Toolkit 1.0 releases to the web today !

Tools Contained:

Batch Site Manager

It will allow you to go into Central Administration, Application Management, and from there repartition sites straight from the UI and handles other tasks such as locking and deleting site collections.

Alert Fixer

A new stsadm command called updatealert which will fix our #2 overall top support issue with alerts not firing after upgrade/migration

http://support.microsoft.com/?id=936759.

It will also fixup URLs in the body of the alerts if the URL of the web application changes

http://support.microsoft.com/?id=936760.

WhitePaper:

http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=117212&clcid=0x409

Download Link:

Blackout Hotfixes Rollups for MOSS and WSS 3.0 available

2008-03-12T17:34:00Z

You may be interested in knowing that we have released the WSSv3 and MOSS blackout hotfixes. These are the fixes from between December and February while we were re-integrating the branches and could not produce hotfix builds.

The build number for the blackout hotfixes is 12.0.6303.5000. When you install it, the version information will record as 12.0.6303.5000. These hotfixes are also Post SP1 and include everything that was in the Post SP1 rollups (SharePoint hotfixes are cumulative). Therefore, if you would prefer to have both the SPLock fixes and the blackout fixes, we would recommend you issue the blackout hotifxes from:

WSSv3 Blackout rollup - http://support.microsoft.com/kb/948945 -

WSSv3 Localized Blackout rollup - http://support.microsoft.com/kb/948957
MOSS Blackout rollup - http://support.microsoft.com/kb/948947 (live in a couple of days, but you can already request it.)

Also don't forget:

Deploy software updates for Windows SharePoint Services 3.0
http://technet2.microsoft.com/windowsserver/WSS/en/library/91649a7e-6b5a-4e5a-9ee5-51951f4b857f1033.mspx,

Deploy software updates for Office SharePoint Server 2007

http://technet2.microsoft.com/Office/en-us/library/f484f5f2-35bb-4d70-bf56-dd1c4c287c721033.mspx

Happy updating!

Denis

Want to run Sharepoint on Windows 2008. Check this out!

2008-02-21T05:19:00Z

I just found this recently published page on the SharePoint TechCenter. It has most all of our content for Windows Server 2008.

This is a great one stop shopping for both KBs and product content.

Windows Server 2008 Resource Center for SharePoint Products and Technologies

To dispose, or not to dispose? That is the question !

2008-02-18T18:52:00Z

To dispose(), or not to dispose() ?

This is the perpetual quandary of any Sharepoint developer !

The mistery is now solved ! There is a excellent post about this issue that is on the top list of common Sharepoint problems:

Roger Lamb's post will give you an overview with detailed examples of the dispose and close methods on the Sharepoint Object Model. When to do and when not!

SharePoint 2007 and WSS 3.0 Dispose Patterns by Example

Post SP1 Rollup hotfix has been released.

2008-02-13T01:42:00Z

In case you don't already know:

The Post SP1 rollup hotfix for WSS 3.0 and MOSS 2007 has been released on our support site !

This fixes includes everything that has been corrected after the code was locked for SP1.

You can find more information on:

WSS - http://support.microsoft.com/kb/941422
MOSS - http://support.microsoft.com/kb/941274

Also don't forget:

Deploy software updates for Windows SharePoint Services 3.0
http://technet2.microsoft.com/windowsserver/WSS/en/library/91649a7e-6b5a-4e5a-9ee5-51951f4b857f1033.mspx,

Deploy software updates for Office SharePoint Server 2007

http://technet2.microsoft.com/Office/en-us/library/f484f5f2-35bb-4d70-bf56-dd1c4c287c721033.mspx

Happy updating!

Denis

Live from Seattle in TechReady 6

2008-02-12T17:45:00Z

Hi,

I am blogging from Seattle, this week I am attending TechReady 6. It's an internal readiness event for all field employees around the world.

It's very cool to meet our peers and colleagues that we only have contact through e-mail during the year. It's also awesome to hang around with the guys that we have worked in other subsidiaries on our past assignments. As far as I can remember I've already met people from UK, Greece, Oman, Spain, US, Ireland, Poland.

This is so geeky ! Sometimes I catch myself speaking with my buddies and in 10 words, usually 8 are acronyms for some product, role or technology. I wonder that someone not technical would have a hard time to understand the conversation.

I will try to blog more about this during the week, However I cannot blog about the technical content itself since it's Microsoft Confidential. Anyway If I have something that worth sharing, I'll write here...

As usual we have a cold and wet Seattle this week...

Have a nice week!

Denis

Hello World !

2008-02-09T04:41:00Z

No this is not one of our code samples ! This is my first blog post...

I work at Microsoft as a PFE (Premier Field Engineer) in EMEA, and I'm based in Portugal.

I usually travel all over Europe and sometimes Middle East to deliver proactive and reactive services for our Premier customers.

My main technology focus at this moment is Sharepoint. So I'll try to post usefull stuff for WSS, MOSS and SPS.

Cheers!
Denis