Hardening SharePoint Installations

I wonder how many people have seen this article on Technet?

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc262834.aspx

It's an excellent resource on hardening your SharePoint environment. Also shows you some commands to use when running PSConfig to set up the Databases.

Extranet hardening planning tool

The following planning tool is available for use with this article: Extranet hardening planning tool: back-to-back perimeter (http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=85533&clcid=0x409). Based on the back-to-back perimeter topology, this tool articulates the port requirements for each of the computers running Microsoft Internet Security and Acceleration (ISA) Server and each of the routers or firewalls. This tool is an editable Microsoft Office Visio file that you can revise for your environment. For example, you can:

• Add your custom port numbers, where applicable.
• Where a choice of protocols or ports is provided, indicate which ports you will use.
• Indicate the specific ports that are used for database communication in your environment.
• Add or remove requirements for ports based on:
  • Whether you are configuring e-mail integration.
  • Which layer you deploy the query role to.
  • If you are configuring a domain trust relationship between the perimeter domain and the corporate domain.

DVD issue and the not-so-helpful error codes

I was playing Rise of Legends over the last few days. After a late night session the day before, I woke up to find that my DVD drive had disappeared. It was physically present, but for some reason it just wouldn't play a movie, a cd and certainly not the game. Flabbergasted, I looked at the Device Manager and discovered an exclamation mark beside the DVD drive. It appeared that I had a pioneer dvd. The error code said that my drivers were corrupted and that I needed to reinstall my DVD driver. Go figure. It's a Pioneer (which, I for some reason, keep spelling Pinoeer) K17 DVDR. After much head bashing, and searching – I happen to consider myself very good at searching – I had to finally give up. Resorting to forums, I found a couple of posts.

One said, I had to reinstall the Operating System. I wasn't willing to do that. Looking at the error code (39) – find explanation here – I had very little hope. Then I came across another post that talked about clearing out a couple of entries in the registry. That rang a bell – I'd read something about that ages ago. I decided to chance it. It's my work machine, and it's a Microsoft game – I figured, I could talk to support. And so I tried the KB article's instructions (Manual – not the automatic stuff) and to my surprise (not really), it worked!

Here's the article for your use. I hope you'll save yourself some trouble at some point because of it.

Article Title: (it worked for my error code 39 too).

You can no longer access the CD drive or the DVD drive, or you receive an error message after you remove a CD recording program or a DVD recording program in Windows XP: "error code 31"

And there’s Audacity…

Almost forgot to write about Audacity. If you're into podcasting – of the audio sort – then you can surely use this free tool. I was somewhat overwhelmed by it at first, but after locating the Record button, I felt a lot better.

Generally most of the podcasting software will record in WAV or other formats that are not MP3. But since MP3's so darn popular, Audacity does come with an Export function. To activate it you'll have to find and download the lame_enc.dll file and tell Audacity where it is (instructions here). Once that's done, you're all set to deliver. I just sent a mail substitute that was 17 mins long with Audacity. I've still to get a response, but initial feedback's been great. Maybe I'll just dump mails in favor of podcasts… and blogs!

Role Change!

Wow, my last post was on the 12^th of May! That's a reflection of year-end madness we get infected with at MS. So, now that that's done with, I can return to posting again.

Update. I've been reallocated as an SSP. So now I'm SSP Biz Productivity. Translation – I was a Techie and now I'm more into the Sales end of business, helping customers realize the benefits of Office & SharePoint. And that is sorely needed.

Since you're here to read about My Two Bits, I'll be glad to give them to you.

Last.FM rocks! I'm enjoying it and listening to dance music all day as I work. Michael Jackson's Thriller's playing for now.

Podcasts are wonderful! I've been plugged into BBC's Global News podcasts, WSJ Tech Briefings, Science Talk by SciAm and Guardian's Science Weekly.

So there. J

No? Well, since I'm such a great fan of Podcasts, the SharePoint team decided to help you create podcasts that I'd enjoy. Hence the launch of the Podcasting Kit for SharePoint (PKS – for short… there we go with Acronyms again)

And how does this work for you? PKS is available as a free CodePlex project here. Combine that with Community Clips from OfficeLabs and you're ready to podcast. The community clips app will allow you to create screencasts with very little trouble and these you can upload to the Podcast site. At MS we have an public facing site for employees and while download speeds are annoyingly slow from Egypt, I do enjoy downloading some great podcasts from the site while in the office. Oh, and with Zune you can subscribe to the Podcasts on PKS (authenticated feeds work!) giving you a seamless solution. There go the days of driving without a podcast.

Oh, one favorite I have these days is Search Commands from OfficeLabs. With all the confusion some newbies (and some experts too) have with the fluent UI in Office 2007, Search Commands allows you to search for the command you're looking for. :D So where will we put search next?

Office Labs

http://officelabs.com

Check out he website to find some interesting tools and ideas that we're trying out.

Concept testing is what this site is all about.  The projects you find here are not products or beta versions. They don't even pretend to be complete product ideas. They are the equivalent of 'concept cars' for software. Automotive companies sometimes produce near and far-future test vehicles to test design concepts or features to see how effective they are. In most cases there is no intent to productize the vehicles as shown. They simply work for the purposes of getting feedback. We do the same for software. The difference is that you to get to test drive the concepts. Because of that, all these experiences are strictly 'use at your own risk', and we can't promise to fix every bug that is reported but we'll try to nip the worst ones.

We are often asked if any of the things seen here will become products or features of products in the future. It's possible that some of them will appear in some form. But what we are really after is feedback and information from you. We want to know how often people use these tools. What parts of them are used most? What are the patterns of usage? Do they work for you? You may see some of the concepts updated over time to improve them based on the feedback. Even with all that, most of these ideas just won't make the cut for a product. Even when something is pretty useful, there are usually many other things even more useful to more people that are selected for inclusion in our products.

You might be wondering why this site isn't located on microsoft.com. One reason is simple: we didn't want to give anyone the impression that these projects are full blown Microsoft products. This site itself is also a concept test. Over time we'll be modifying it to experiment with ways to engage with you, our community.

from: Welcome to Microsoft Office Labs

SharePoint Customizations – SP1 and onwards

SharePoint Products and Technologies Customization Best Practices

This section describes best practices for many common types of customizations and whether they are supported in Microsoft SharePoint Products and Technologies. Customization, as used in this section, means any addition to, change to, or removal of the settings, content, and templates provided by SharePoint Products and Technologies. Unless otherwise specified, the descriptions in this documentation apply to all SharePoint Products and Technologies, including Office SharePoint Server 2007 and Windows SharePoint Services 3.0.

We've updated this section with the SP1 release. Kindly review it and ensure that your solutions adhere to these:

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb861954.aspx

Specifically, kindly ensure that you technical teams are up-to-date with the following topics:

• Pluggable Authentication
• Modifying built-in SharePoint files
• SharePoint designer editing

Also here's an excellent guide to customizing SharePoint:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc261852.aspx

The goal of this guide is to provide prescriptive guidance that can help you and your team build custom enterprise sites by using Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 — such as company-wide portal sites or Internet presence sites. Custom sites based on Office SharePoint Server 2007 combine coded elements, such as workflows, document converters, and Web Parts, along with content, such as master pages, layout pages, graphics files, and Web pages. Best practices for developing these sites include setting up multiple environments for developing, integrating, piloting, and deploying coded elements and content from one environment to another. Therefore, coordinating the development and deployment of an enterprise site based on Office SharePoint Server 2007 is a complex activity. This guide describes the ways you can set up the multiple environments used in the development process and the methods for deploying content and code from one environment to another.

3 Things

Repost from the SharePoint team blog:

• Three recent additions to the SharePoint Features project:
  • Toolbar Manager: This Feature allows you to selectively show and hide menu items on the standard list/library toolbar. The feature adds a new web part to the gallery that you can place on any list/library view page. Once placed on the page, you can use the properties of the web part to show or hide menu items. This is the perfect solution for hiding a single menu item such as "Export to Spreadsheet" to prevent users from taking that action. Developed by Scot Hillier, a SharePoint MVP.
  • Unique Column Policy: This Feature creates a new Information Policy that allows you to specify a column in a list or library that should have unique values. It is accessible from the Information Policy link on the list/library settings page. When you turn on the policy, you can then select the column where the unique constraint should be applied. Also developed by Scot Hillier.
  • Reset Theme: This feature changes the theme and logo for every site in a collection. A link appears on the Site Settings page to access the feature. very useful for making wholesale changes to the branding of a site collection. Developed by Romelard Fabrice, a SQL Server MVP.

InfoPath fronting SharePoint

So SharePoint was the front-end view for quite a few apps, but now, here's one step further. Why not build your application logic using InfoPath. So I recently read two articles about it and putting them together, you may see more solutions. Here goes:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/cc194406.aspx

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc162745.aspx

The techniques and CAML used may be useful to your future implementations.

Open Standards @ MS – more steps

More positive news from the Open Standards front – we've got the Open Specifications Promise from MS dated 2006 and it looks like we also have freed up the Office binary formats – so you don't need to move to Office 2007 formats to rest easy that your documents will be openable a thousand years from now!

More on OSP here: http://www.microsoft.com/interop/osp/default.mspx

Office binary format specs: http://www.microsoft.com/interop/docs/OfficeBinaryFormats.mspx

External Access API

We've got an interesting bit of news for you. When competing with most Doc Mgmt products a key requirement is external file storage (or storage on file system). SharePoint's key failing was that SQL is the default and only store. With the following article, we address this issue in SP1 rollup… and there are more hidden gems in that SP1 – help us find more relevant ones! – post on http://blogs.technet.com/Kailash

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/938499/

INTRODUCTION

An external storage API is available for Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services 3.0. The external storage API lets you store documents or files on an external storage device other than Microsoft SQL Server. This API also lets you upgrade existing Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 sites to point to an external storage device.

 And here's the article on MSDN: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb802976.aspx

Office 2007 Compatibility Pack

From Brian Jones' blog:

The availability of the compatibility pack has been an interesting discussion. Today, the compatibility pack is only available as a manual download. In other words, Microsoft does not "push" the compatibility pack to users using its update tools. IT organizations or end users must manually download the tool, and deploy or install it themselves. Many organizations have (literally) demanded this be made available as an automatic update, while others would be dissatisfied with this, claiming that Microsoft is "forcing" Open XML onto its existing user community.

We decided to make it available as a manual download, and not as an automatic update, and during the first 12 months of its release, the compatibility pack has been successfully downloaded over 20 million times. This means that 20 million people have elected to manually download this 26.2MB software to their computer. This is a significant number of people adding Open XML to their environment

Knowledge Centers

I met Mike Gannotti in Seattle in July last year. He presented at a small team gathering and told us of the work he'd done around Knowledge Centers. That idea stuck with me and here's the complete series he's posted on getting them up and running.

Have a look at the first: http://sharepoint.microsoft.com/blogs/mikeg/Lists/Posts/Post.aspx?ID=258

Thanks Mike!

New SharePoint iFilters

We released our Filter Pack for SharePoint this week. A must have for everyone!

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=60c92a37-719c-4077-b5c6-cac34f4227cc&DisplayLang=en

Since many products are built on the underlying SharePoint Search platform this filter pack adds capabilities to a number of products (WDS, SharePoint, Exchange, SQL).  The big thing in the pack is the addition of the OneNote and ZIP iFilters.

Logon prompt when opening documents on a public MOSS site

A customer issue again – I'm learning more and more from my customers these days!

So, said customer has a MOSS internet site and does the publishing from an internal staging server. Of course the site on the internet is enabled for anonymous users. But when a Word document on the site is opened – i.e. – http://www.mysite.com/docsfolder/document.doc the user finds Word starting up to render the document and prompting for username & password – as you may agree, this is unexpected behavior.

I was somewhat stumped, but thankfully my colleagues came to my rescue and found me some useful info on 2 situations where this issue arises.

Word 2003 onwards, we seem to be using HTTP 1.1 Options command when opening documents from a web location and if the webserver requires permissions we generate a prompt – well if you want the details, here's the article but the gist of it as it pertains to my customer was that the customer had to allow browse permissions on the folder holding the document – i.e. – anonymous access is to be enabled on the document's folder and user given view privileges for list.

Issue 2 is Vista specific and you'll find more info here. Here are the hotfixes:

Hotfix 941853 (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/941853)

Hotfix 941890 (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/941890)

Thanks to Jacob & Andy for the info!

And there's more! As TParker laments in his entry, you'll need one final bit twist:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/927082/en-us?spid=11373&sid=200

Don't forget the following bit!

Note After you run this command line against your site, you must toggle the Site and Surveys permissions to turn off Anonymous access. Then, turn on Anonymous access again. You must do this for the command to take effect on content that exists in the site.

Microsoft and Stratature

June 7, 2007—Today, Microsoft announced the acquisition of Stratature. This announcement builds on the relationship Microsoft and Stratature have already established, and will accelerate Microsoft's delivery of technology in the MDM market; it represents the culmination of a company-wide effort across the Microsoft SQL Server, Business Intelligence and Microsoft Office SharePoint technology groups to deliver on a unified Master Data Management solution.

Stratature is recognized as a leader in the Master Data Management market, and Microsoft values their experience, the products they have created and the services they provide. With Stratature, Microsoft can now offer increased MDM capabilities as an integral part of Microsoft Office System applications and servers.

Microsoft will integrate +EDM technology into its product offerings, and is committed to providing its partners the best opportunities to offer products and services to customers that integrate data management across the enterprise.

And here are the details of the acquisition:
http://www.microsoft.com/sharepoint/mdm/default.mspx

So, What is MDM?