Chris Hernandez's Blog : SharePoint Server

Database Attach Shared Services Provider (SSP)

chrishe — Mon, 15 Oct 2007 09:17:00 GMT

Performing a database attach using STSADM.exe is useful for migrating or upgrading existing data. Here is an example of how to use the STSADM.exe commands to be able to perform a db attach for the Shared Services Provider (SSP):

Create the web application and associate the Shared Services Content database with the restored database by first creating a web application for the Shared Services Provider and specifying the content database that was restored.

For example:

stsadm.exe -o extendvs -url http://intranet:8080 -ownerlogin redmond\user -owneremail

a@b.com -exclusivelyusentlm -databaseserver SQLServer -databasename SharedServices1_Content -apcreatenew -apidname SSP_Apppool -apidtype configurableid -apidlogin redmond\user -apidpwd MyPassword

Note that the databasename parameter is the Shared Services Content database that was restored.

To create the SSP we use the restoressp command with the sspdatabasename and searchdatabasename parameters set as the databases that were restored.

For example:

STSADM.EXE -o restoressp -title Migrated_SSP -url http://intranet:8080 -ssplogin redmond\user -ssppassword MyPassword -mysiteurl http://intranet/MySite -indexserver intranet -indexlocation "D:\Program Files\Microsoft Office Servers\12.0\Data\Applications" -sspdatabaseserver intranet -sspdatabasename SharedServices1 -searchdatabaseserver intranet -searchdatabasename SharedServices1_Search

Again note that the sspdatabasename and searchdatabasename parameters are the databases that were restored as these will now be attached to the Shared Services Provider for the installation.

Simple Updates to Make Your MySite More Useful

chrishe — Wed, 10 Oct 2007 03:56:00 GMT

The SharePoint Server MySite page is intended to be the default landing place for a user to see information that is useful to them. Unfortunately, the unmodified, out-of-box MySite page leaves some room for improvement to make it a more useful experience and a site that a user would want to have as their default home page. While there are updates using customization that can increase the usefulness of the page, here are some simple changes that can also update the MySite but don't require any custom code or even SharePoint Designer.

Change the color theme for your MySite - under the Site Actions tab -> Site Settings -> Site Theme. (I like the Classic theme which has a nice yellow gradient and is a bit different from the default blue one but not too different).
Remove web parts you won't use - you can easily click on the right corner arrow drop down and select Close for any web parts you won't use (such as the Get Started with My Site info web part)
Edit Your Profile - adding profile information takes only a couple of minutes to complete but it will increase the useful of the site for you by making it more informative to others that view your profile
My Links and the My Links web part - the My Links feature is on the top navigation menu and is another way to bookmark URLs on the SharePoint Server farm and if you make use of this feature you should add the web part which is already on your My Site Public Profile page
Add Outlook Web Access web parts - My Calendar web part is added by default but I find it useful to have the My Contacts and My Inbox added as well
Add the Web Capture web part - using the web capture web part is a very easy way to synchronize data between the web part and some other content
Add RSS Viewer web part - one of the cooler web parts are the RSS Viewer web parts that allow you to pull in all sorts of data. Here are some examples of RSS feed URLs that I have:

Stock symbol RSS feed: http://tc.dk/stock.php?symbols=msft
MSNBC.com top headlines: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3032091/device/rss/
Daily Dilbert: http://feeds.feedburner.com/tapestrydilbert

Using PSConfig.exe command-line options to complete SharePont Server Configuration

chrishe — Tue, 09 Oct 2007 00:26:00 GMT

After SharePoint Server setup has completed, the admin may run the SharePoint Products and Technologies Configuration Wizard to complete the configuration steps, but there may be a need to run these steps via the command-line or to just to get a better understanding of what steps the wizard performs using PSConfig.exe:

For more information about the PSConfig.exe command:

http://technet2.microsoft.com/Office/en-us/library/a59c4e8f-9b7f-4127-8199-1b9ab76991501033.mspx

1. Create the ConfigDB:

PSConfig.exe -cmd configdb -create -server <Server_name> -database <Database_name>

-dbuser <DOMAIN\username> -dbpassword <password>

-user <DOMAIN\username> -password <password>

-addomain <domain_name> -adorgunit <org_unit>

-admincontentdatabase <Database_name>

Note that if you wish to connect to an existing configuration database and join the server to an existing server farm you will need to perform the ConfigDB command with the -connect parameter

2. Install all HelpCollections

psconfig.exe -cmd helpcollections –installall

3. Perform resource security enforcement

psconfig.exe -cmd secureresources

4. Register the services in the server farm

psconfig.exe -cmd services -install

Note that before you can provision we will need to start and configure the Search service via the STSADM.exe command:

Start the Windows SharePoint Services Search:

stsadm -o spsearch -action start -farmserviceaccount Redmond\user -farmservicepassword MyPassword

Start the Office SharePoint Server Search service:

stsadm -o osearch -action start -role IndexQuery -farmserviceaccount Redmond\user -farmservicepassword MyPassword -farmcontactemail user@ms.com

psconfig.exe -cmd services –provision

5. Register all features

psconfig.exe -cmd installfeatures

6. Provision the SharePoint Central Administration Web application

psconfig.exe -cmd adminvs -provision -port 9000 -windowsauthprovider onlyusentlm

7. Install shared application data

psconfig.exe -cmd applicationcontent -install

Increasing the frequency of the Profile and Membership Sync timer jobs

chrishe — Sun, 07 Oct 2007 11:05:00 GMT

One of the new features in MOSS 2007 is the ability to synchronize WSS user data to SharePoint Server. One of the areas where this is synchronization is displayed is within the MySite SharePoint Sites web part which will display all sites that the user is a member of.

The default frequency of the synchronization job is every 1 hour but you can increase the frequency by running this STSADM.exe command:

stsadm.exe -o sync -synctiming M:15

which will result in the sync jobs occurring every 15 minutes.

Updating the SharePoint Admin Password on an existing Farm

chrishe — Thu, 04 Oct 2007 21:35:00 GMT

The security policy for many IT departments within organizations requires that passwords be changed after a certain time period. This would require that the accounts associated with a SharePoint Server Farm install be updated.

Here are some steps to do this:

If you are fortunately enough to know the new password before the change has occurred you can:

stsadm -o updatefarmcredentials -userlogin "domain user" -password "newPassword"
iisreset
stsadm -o updateaccountpassword -userlogin "domain user" -password "newpassword" -noadmin

To change the password after the change has been rolled out:

Update all service accounts passwords for the SQL server if the service is running as a domain account
Under the Internet Information Services (IIS) Manager update the password for each Application Pool by going to the properties and clicking on the Identity tab
At this point you should be able to view the Central Admin Site, where you will update the password for the SSP Service credentials by either method:

SharePoint Central Admin -> Click on the left nav Shared Services Administration link -> use the drop down on the SSP you need to change and click on Edit Properties -> Update the values for the SSP Service Credentials
STSADM.exe -o editssp -title <SSP name> -ssplogin <username> -ssppassword <password>

Update the Search Service credentials: Central Admin -> Operations -> Services on Server -> Office SharePoint Server Search -> update the credentials for the Service Account
Profile Import credentials: SSP Admin -> User Profile and Properties -> Configure Profile Import -> Set the access account credentials

Enumerating thru User Profiles

chrishe — Thu, 04 Oct 2007 21:21:00 GMT

SharePoint Server allows user profile data to be imported from various sources such as the Active Directory, LDAP, and using a Business Data Catalog (BDC) connection to almost any data source that contains user info.

There may be a need to enumerate thru all the user profiles once the data has been imported and perform actions on each user profile.

Here is a simple code example that does this using an enumerator in C#:

SPSite site = new SPSite("http://localhost");

ServerContext context = ServerContext.GetContext(site);

UserProfileManager upm = new UserProfileManager(context);

UserProfile currentProfile;

IEnumerator enumProfs = upm.GetEnumerator();

bool continueEnum = true;

while (continueEnum)

{

try

{

continueEnum = enumProfs.MoveNext();

}

catch (Exception e)

{

Console.WriteLine("EXCEPTION in enum - try to move to next: " + e.ToString());

continueEnum = enumProfs.MoveNext();

}

currentProfile = (UserProfile)enumProfs.Current;

// do some action on each currentProfile

}

Note that I put the try/catch block to handle the scenario that as you are running the tool any profiles get modified since the import was performed. This would throw an exception and that can be handled any way perferred including what I've done which is simply to write the error to the console and continue.

Creating Audience Rules via the Object Model

chrishe — Thu, 04 Oct 2007 01:04:00 GMT

SharePoint Server (MOSS) was designed as a platform for building applications upon. Using the SharePoint Server Object Model (OM) exposes many different and often more complicated operations than what can be done with the UI only.

An example of this is with Audience creation. Audiences are an organizational type concept that is associated with the Shared Service Provider (SSP). Audiences can be built up using rules that are exposed within the Admin UI for such properties as Account Name or Title. In this way you may be able to create audiences that comprise of user profiles that all have a property in common and can then use this compiled audience for such things as targeting content.

The Audience OM allows the creation of audiences that can be more complicated in their evaluation. For example, the Audience OM allows the groupings of audience rules which will result in compiled audiences based on a combination of AND/OR clauses.

                // Create thet test audience.
                this.testAudience = this.audienceManager.Audiences.Create(
                    TestStringGenerator.GetString(MaxAudienceNameLength),
                    TestStringGenerator.GetString(
                        MaxAudienceDescriptionLength));
                this.testAudience.GroupOperation =
                    AudienceGroupOperation.AUDIENCE_OR_OPERATION;

// Add the desired rule to the test audience.
ArrayList audienceRules = new ArrayList();

AudienceRuleComponent r1 = new AudienceRuleComponent("AccountName", "Contains", this.DLTestAccountName1);
audienceRules.Add(r1);

AudienceRuleComponent r2 = new AudienceRuleComponent(null, "OR", null);
audienceRules.Add(r2);

AudienceRuleComponent r3 = new AudienceRuleComponent("AccountName", "Contains", this.DLTestAccountName2);
audienceRules.Add(r3);

this.testAudience.AudienceRules = audienceRules;
this.testAudience.Commit();

From the code above you can see that:

this.testAudience.GroupOperation =
AudienceGroupOperation.AUDIENCE_OR_OPERATION;

Sets the group operation for the audience similar to the Audience Admin UI where you can select

Include users who:

Satisfy all of the rules

Satisfy any of the rules

But with via OM you can specify groupings by using parentheses () with this:

new AudienceRuleComponent(null, "(", null);

new AudienceRuleComponent(null, ")", null);

so that now you can represent an expression like this:

(AccountName contains DLTestAccountName1 OR AccountName contains DLTestAccountName1)

AND

(Title contains TestTitle1 OR Title contains TestTitle2)

Creating Shared Service Provider (SSP) via command-line options

chrishe — Thu, 04 Oct 2007 00:37:00 GMT

Using the SharePoint Admin UI there can often be quite a delay to perform administrative actions compared to doing the same actions via the powerful command-line tools. One of the tools that should be very familiar to SharePoint Admins is STSADM.exe.

The STSADM.exe admin tool is available in the default location: c:\program files\common files\microsoft shared\web server extensions\12\bin. To see what actions are available with the tool you can run STSADM.exe –help which will output the operations that can be performed and STSADM.exe –help <operation name> to get more detailed documentation about a particular operation.

Creating the Shared Service Provider (SSP) is one admin task that can be done via the command-line:

The recommended procedure for creating an SSP is to create a web application for the MySite host and a separate web application for the SSP. To create a new web application for both the MySite host and SSP run this STSADM.exe command for each new web application:

stsadm.exe -o extendvs -url <URL> -ownerlogin <domain/username> -owneremail <emailed> -exclusivelyusentlm -databaseserver <DBservername> -databasename <NewcontentDBname> -donotcreatesite -apcreatenew -apidname <Apppoolname> -apidtype configurableid -apidlogin <domain/username> -apidpwd <Password>

For example:

stsadm.exe -o extendvs -url http://intranet:8080 -ownerlogin Redmond\username -owneremail user@ms.com -exclusivelyusentlm -databaseserver SQLServer -databasename MySiteContentDB -donotcreatesite -apcreatenew -apidname MySiteAppPool -apidtype configurableid -apidlogin Redmond\username -apidpwd MyPassword

will create a web application with the URL http://intranet:8080 that can be used to host the MySite sites. Similarly, you can create another web application to host the SSP:

stsadm.exe -o extendvs -url http://intranet:8090 -ownerlogin Redmond\username -owneremail user@ms.com -exclusivelyusentlm -databaseserver SQLServer -databasename SSPContentDB -donotcreatesite -apcreatenew -apidname SSPAppPool -apidtype configurableid -apidlogin Redmond\username -apidpwd MyPassword

At this point, you can create the SSP by running this STSADM.exe command:

stsadm.exe –o createssp –title <SSP name> -url <Web application url> -mysiteurl <MySite Web application url> -ssplogin <username> -indexserver <index server> -indexlocation <index file path> -ssppassword <password> -sspdatabaseserver <SSP database server> -sspdatabasename <SSP database name>