Marcus Hass' [MS] Blog : SharePoint

Microsoft Online and SBS 2003

mhass — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 05:16:00 GMT

I have been working with the Microsoft BPOS aka Microsoft Online guys in Enterprise accounts for a while to help big companies migrate to BPOS dedicated. Don’t know what that is? Check out www.microsoftonline.com. To sum it up, it is hosted Exchange, SharePoint, OCS, LiveMeeting, and a few other offerings. For bigger businesses, Microsoft sets up dedicated hosting servers, for small it is multitenant.

I help out a small company from time to time because they have 15 employees and a Small Business Server 2003 environment. They are constantly running out of space on their 5 year old server because mail boxes keep growing because of attachment sizes. These guys are the perfect scenario to migrate to Microsoft Online!

So, I setup a free trial and started loading some of the coexistence tools like email sync and dirsync onto the Small Business server. Well, that was the plan. Turns out, dirsync can’t be run on a domain controller and will only run on Windows Server 2003. I think the BPOS guys missed the Small Businesses aren’t going to have an extra server lying around. How can you miss this scenario when building your tools, especially a segment of the market so perfect for BPOS?

So, they will have to forgo the coexistence and migrate mailboxes in one fell swoop over a weekend, which won’t be pretty over the small network connection they have.

I am sure there are technical reasons, and that's what will be used as an excuse. It just disappoints me when we have really smart guys that miss such a big opportunity to help small businesses.

SharePoint 3.0 WSP Deployment Scripts

mhass — Mon, 20 Aug 2007 22:03:00 GMT

I have been working with a customer over the last few weeks to come up with a mechanism that their Configuration Management (CM) team can use to deploy custom WSS code. Fortunately, WSS allows our developers to wrap up their code into a Solution (WSP files). The solution can have things like templates that go on the file system, web.config changes and features. Features are cool little things that can do things on WSS as well as have additional tasks on the server or file system, all defined by the developer through and XML file. Not all solutions will have a feature.

The trick here was to make it very simple for the CM team to deploy different versions of code to different environments such as Dev, Test and Prod. So, I looked at some of my old WSS 2.0 scripts that would deploy web parts out to EVERY INDIVIDUAL box in the farm by draining the application pools, deploying the DLL and GAC'ing them, restarting the web site (iisapp.vbs), and running a warm up script to fire up the ISAPI filters. This was a pain for the CM teams, especially in Internet facing properties that you wish to have as little service interruption as possible. You had to really watch the logs to ensure each box updated successfully, restart the site, etc.

WSS 3.0 makes this a lot easier by having a solution database that can store those solutions that you want to deploy, and then can either use a timer to deploy them across the farm or you can force them. You deploy the solution to a single web server in the farm, it is stored in the solution database, and SharePoint takes care of installing them on all the web boxes. In my scripts below, we decided that we would rather have the solutions deploy immediately so that we could troubleshoot any problems right away.

I further wanted to simplify the CM groups deployment by having all deployment scripts and logs on a central server. They basically "push a button" for the particular solution package they want to deploy and it fires off a remote task to the web server.

The last BIG bonus about this is disaster recovery. Since we do SQL backups regularly, we are able to bring up a new SharePoint farm, restore our DB's, run our WSP files, and we are back in business. This is how MSIT does it, BTW.

Here is how it works, pay attention, it gets a little tricky as to what server is running what:

Basically, a script is kicked off on the deployment server with parameters for the environment, it fires SchedTaskWebSolDeploy.cmd, which fires a WMIC command to the web server based on name in WMICSolMachines.txt. This wakes up a scheduled task on the web server, which is set to only run once in 1978 (ensuring that it doesn't fire automatically), and runs the WebServerDeploySolutionwithFeature.cmd. All of these output log files on the deployment server so that the status can easily be checked from a central place.

Below are the scripts, I posted them as text to have the search engines crawl them for reference. If you want to skip to the good stuff, it is in the WebServerDeploySolutionWithFeature.cmd section. Please NOTE: Thes scripts are intended to overwrite the existing Solutions and Features, so be sure you know what they do before you get them up and running. Also, the normal rules apply here around the fact that these are examples, please use at your risk and support them yourselves, the last thing I need is any midnight phone calls.

The names of the innocent servers have been changed to "deploymentserver" or "mossdev" to protect their identity:

DeployWebPartsFeature.cmd

://////////////////////////////////////////////////
:// Author: Marcus Hass (mhass@microsoft.com)
:// Version: 2.0
:// Date: 08.01.2007
://
:// Notes:
://
://   Runs a remote task via WMIC to deploy a SharePoint 2007 Solution
://   THIS SCRIPT MUST BE RUN FROM THE deployscripts DIRECTORY (assumes the \CORE is below current direcotry)
://   Assumes all necesary infrastructure exists for Sharepoint on all boxes
://   Assumes that the remote scheduled tasks exist
://
:// Inputs:
://
://   LogFile(%1) - Path to centralized log file (i.e \\endor\deployscripts$)
://   WebSiteName(%2) - The name of the web site that will be deployed to, also used on log file name (Tntranet, ProdMOSSWeb1)
://   PathtoScripts(%3) - UNC path to scripts (i.e. \\endor\deployscripts$)
://   SchedTaskName(%4) - Name of the scheduled task on the remote box
://
://////////////////////////////////////////////////
echo Starting DeployDeployIntranetSiteDefWSP.cmd

\\deploymentserver\deployscripts$\dev\core\SchedTaskWebSolDepoly.cmd \\deploymentserver\deployscripts$\dev\logs \\deploymentserver\deployscripts$\dev DeployWebPartsFeature

SchedTaskWebSolDepoly.cmd

@echo off
://////////////////////////////////////////////////
:// Author: Marcus Hass (mhass@microsoft.com)
:// Version: 2.0
:// Date: 08.01.2007
://
:// Script File:
://
://   SchedTaskWebSolDeply.cmd
://
:// Notes:
://
://   Runs the local sched task to deploy a MOSS solution
://   THIS SCRIPT MUST BE RUN FROM THE deployscripts DIRECTORY (assumes the \CORE is below current direcotry)
://   Assumes all necesary infrastructure exists for Sharepoint on all boxes
://   Assumes that the remote scheduled tasks exist
://
:// Inputs:
://
://   LogFile(%1) - Path to centralized log file (i.e \\endor\deployscripts$, etc)
://   PathtoScripts(%2) - UNC path to scripts (i.e. \\endor\deployscripts$, etc)
://   SchedTaskName(%3) - Name of the scheduled task on the remote box
://
:// Outputs:
://
:// Environment variables referenced:
://
:// Runs in:
://
://   N32, N64
://
://////////////////////////////////////////////////

:Main

:// Validate the input parameters to make sure they exist.

if NOT "%1"=="" goto :LogFileOK
    echo ERROR: Empty LogFile parameter. Aborting.
    set RETSTS=1
    goto :usage
:LogFileOK

set PathtoScripts=%2
set SchedTaskName=%3
set LogFile=%1\Status%computername%%WebSiteName%_DeployServer.txt

:// Sending script info to log file

echo. >> %LogFile%
echo Running script SchedTaskWebSolDeploy >> %LogFile%
Date /T >> %LogFile%
Time /T >> %LogFile%
set username >> %LogFile%

:// Run script to envoke remote scheduled tasks

set cmd1=WMIC /node:@"%PathtoScripts%\WMICSolMachines.txt" PROCESS CALL Create "schtasks /Run /TN %SchedTaskName%"

echo.
echo.
echo Sending Deployment commands to remote computers.
echo.
echo Envoking remote scheduled tasks using the following command: >> %LogFile%
echo Envoking remote scheduled tasks using the following command:
echo %cmd1% >> %LogFile%
echo %cmd1%

%cmd1% >> %LogFile%

:// If error with command tell user and dump out of script

if "%ERRORLEVEL%"=="0" goto :Oktogotoend
    echo Error running the command: %cmd3%, please check log file located at %LogFile%. >> %LogFile%
    echo Error running the command: %cmd3%, please check log file located at %LogFile%
    goto :bigerror
:Oktogotoend

echo.
echo.
echo +-----------------------------------------------------+
echo Script is successful and did not return any errors
echo Log File located at: %LogFile%
echo +-----------------------------------------------------+
echo Please check log files for remote computers as status
echo is not reported in this deployment script
echo +----------------------------------------------------+
echo.
echo Script is successful and did not return any errors >> %LogFile%
echo Please check log files for remote computers as status >> %LogFile%
echo is not reported in this deployment script >> %LogFile%
pause

goto :end

:bigerror
echo !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! >> %LogFile%
echo. >> %LogFile%
echo A catastropic error has occured and the deployment can not continue, please check >> %LogFile%
echo error logs located at %LogFile% >> %LogFile%
echo The return status code was %RETSTS% %ERRORLEVEL% >> %LogFile%
echo. >> %LogFile%
echo !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! >> %LogFile%
echo.
echo.
echo.
echo !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
echo.
echo A catastropic error has occured and the deployment can not continue, please check
echo error logs located at %LogFile%
echo The return status code was %RETSTS% %ERRORLEVEL%
echo.
echo !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
echo.
echo.
pause
goto :end
://////////////////////////////////////////////////
://
:// Script end.
://
://////////////////////////////////////////////////

:end

set LogFile=
set PathtoScripts=
set cmd1=

WMICSolMachines.txt

webservername

Example of DeployWebPartsFeature Scheduled Task Command Line:

://////////////////////////////////////////////////
:// Author: Marcus Hass (mhass@microsoft.com)
:// Version: 2.0
:// Date: 08.01.2007
://
:// Notes:
://
://   Schedulede Task Name: DeploySolution
://   This is an example file that details what should be in the scheduled task on a remote box.
://
:// Inputs:
://
://   LogFile(%1) - Path to centralized log file (i.e \\endor\deployscripts$\logs)
://   PathtoCode(%2) - UNC Path to Code repository (i.e. \\endor\code$\prod)
://   AppVer(%3) - version of software to deploy (i.e., current, 1.0.0.0)
://   WebSiteName(%4) - The name of the web site that will be deployed to (i.e. Intranet, ProdMOSSWeb1)
://   SiteDefName(%5) - Name of the feature that will be activated/deactivated, Filename and solution names should match (i.e. IntranetSiteDef)
://   PathToScripts(%6) - Path to where the scripts are located (i.e \\endor\deployscripts$)
://
://////////////////////////////////////////////////

://Example of commandline:

\\deploymentserver\deployscripts$\dev\core\WebServerDeploySolutionWithFeature.cmd \\deploymentserver\deployscripts$\dev\logs \\deploymentserver\code$ dev\current mossdev WebPartsFeature \\deploymentserver\deployscripts$\dev

WebServerDeploySolutionWithFeature.cmd

@echo off
://////////////////////////////////////////////////
:// Author: Marcus Hass (mhass@microsoft.com)
:// Version: 2.0
:// Date: 08.01.2007
://
:// Script File:
://
://   WebServerDeploySolutionWithFeature.cmd
://
:// Notes:
://
://   This script is called by a scheduled task on a MOSS web front end server
://   THIS SCRIPT MUST BE RUN FROM THE deployscripts DIRECTORY (assumes the \CORE is below current direcotry)
://   Assumes all necesary infrastructure exists for Sharepoint on all boxes
://
:// Inputs:
://
://   LogFile(%1) - Path to centralized log file (i.e \\endor\deployscripts$\logs)
://   PathtoCode(%2) - UNC Path to Code repository (i.e. \\endor\code$\prod)
://   AppVer(%3) - version of software to deploy (i.e., current, 1.0.0.0)
://   WebSiteName(%4) - The name of the web site that will be deployed to (i.e. Intranet, ProdMOSSWeb1)
://   SiteDefName(%5) - Name of the feature that will be activated/deactivated, Filename and solution names should match (i.e. IntranetSiteDef)
://   PathToScripts(%6) - Path to where the scripts are located (i.e \\endor\deployscripts$)
://
:// Outputs:
://
://   LogFile=%1\SolutionDeployFeature%computername%%WebSiteName%.txt
://
:// Environment variables referenced:
://
://   ComputerName
://
:// Runs in:
://
://   N32, N64
://
://////////////////////////////////////////////////

:Main

:// Validate the input parameters to make sure they exist.

if NOT "%1"=="" goto :LogFileOK
    echo ERROR: Empty LogFile parameter. Aborting.
    echo ERROR: Empty LogFile parameter. Aborting. >> c:\DeploySolution.txt
    set RETSTS=1
    goto :end
:LogFileOK

if NOT "%6"=="" goto :BadParmsOK
    echo ERROR: Not All Paramters have been supplied. Aborting.
    echo ERROR: Not All Paramters have been supplied. Aborting. >> c:\DeploySolution.txt
    set RETSTS=1
    goto :end
:BadParmsOK

set PathtoCode=%2
set AppVer=%3
set WebSiteName=%4
set SiteDefName=%5
set PathToScripts=%6
set DepFeatureName1=ITWebParts
set LogFile=%1\SolutionDeployFeature%computername%%WebSiteName%.txt

set stsadmpath="C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\12\BIN"

:// Sending script info to log file

echo. >> %LogFile%
echo Running script WebServerDeploySolutionWithFeature >> %LogFile%
Date /T >> %LogFile%
Time /T >> %LogFile%
set username >> %LogFile%

:// need to retract the solution so it can be replaced

set cmd2=%stsadmpath%\stsadm -o retractsolution -name %SiteDefName%.wsp -immediate

echo Running the following command to retract the solution >> %LogFile%
echo Running the following command to retract the solution:
echo %cmd2% >> %LogFile%
echo %cmd2%

call %cmd2% >> %LogFile%

:// If error with command tell user but DONT dump out of script

if "%ERRORLEVEL%"=="0" goto :retractok
    echo Error running STSADM retract command, please check log file located at %LogFile%. >> %LogFile%
    echo Error running STSADM retract command, please check log file located at %LogFile%.
    set ERRORLEVEL=0
:retractok

:// Executing the commands across the farm, this done after most commands

set cmd3=%stsadmpath%\stsadm -o execadmsvcjobs

echo Executing the commands across the farm using the command: >> %LogFile%
echo Executing the commands across the farm using the command
echo %cmd3% >> %LogFile%
echo %cmd3%

call %cmd3% >> %LogFile%

:// If error with command tell user and dump out of script

if "%ERRORLEVEL%"=="0" goto :execute1ok
    echo Error executing execadmsvcjobs1, please check log file located at %LogFile%. >> %LogFile%
    echo Error executing execadmsvcjobs1, please check log file located at %LogFile%.
    goto :bigerror
:execute1ok

:// need to delete the solution so it can be replaced

set cmd4=%stsadmpath%\stsadm -o deletesolution -name %SiteDefName%.wsp -override

echo Running the following command to delete the solution >> %LogFile%
echo Running the following command to delete the solution:
echo %cmd4% >> %LogFile%
echo %cmd4%

call %cmd4% >> %LogFile%

:// If error with command tell user but DONT dump out of script

if "%ERRORLEVEL%"=="0" goto :deleteok
    echo Error running STSADM deletesolution command, please check log file located at %LogFile%. >> %LogFile%
    echo Error running STSADM deletesolution command, please check log file located at %LogFile%.
    set ERRORLEVEL=0
:deleteok

:// Executing the commands across the farm, this done after most commands

set cmd5=%stsadmpath%\stsadm -o execadmsvcjobs

echo Executing the commands across the farm using the command: >> %LogFile%
echo Executing the commands across the farm using the command
echo %cmd5% >> %LogFile%
echo %cmd5%

call %cmd5% >> %LogFile%

:// If error with command tell user and dump out of script

if "%ERRORLEVEL%"=="0" goto :execute2ok
    echo Error executing execadmsvcjobs2, please check log file located at %LogFile%. >> %LogFile%
    echo Error executing execadmsvcjobs2, please check log file located at %LogFile%.
    goto :bigerror
:execute2ok

:// need to add the solution to the repository

set cmd6=%stsadmpath%\stsadm -o addsolution -filename %PathtoCode%\%AppVer%\%SiteDefName%.wsp

echo Running the following command to add the solution >> %LogFile%
echo Running the following command to add the solution:
echo %cmd6% >> %LogFile%
echo %cmd6%

call %cmd6% >> %LogFile%

:// If error with command tell user and dump out of script

if "%ERRORLEVEL%"=="0" goto :addsolutionok
    echo Error running STSADM addsolution command, please check log file located at %LogFile%. >> %LogFile%
    echo Error running STSADM addsolution command, please check log file located at %LogFile%.
    goto :bigerror
:addsolutionok

:// Executing the commands across the farm, this done after most commands

set cmd7=%stsadmpath%\stsadm -o execadmsvcjobs

echo Executing the commands across the farm using the command: >> %LogFile%
echo Executing the commands across the farm using the command
echo %cmd7% >> %LogFile%
echo %cmd7%

call %cmd7% >> %LogFile%

:// If error with command tell user and dump out of script

if "%ERRORLEVEL%"=="0" goto :execute3ok
    echo Error executing execadmsvcjobs3, please check log file located at %LogFile%. >> %LogFile%
    echo Error executing execadmsvcjobs3, please check log file located at %LogFile%.
    goto :bigerror
:execute3ok

:// need to deploy the solution from the repository

set cmd8=%stsadmpath%\stsadm -o deploysolution -name %SiteDefName%.wsp -immediate -allowGacDeployment -allowCasPolicies -allcontenturls -force

echo Running the following command to add the solution >> %LogFile%
echo Running the following command to add the solution:
echo %cmd8% >> %LogFile%
echo %cmd8%

call %cmd8% >> %LogFile%

:// If error with command tell user and dump out of script

if "%ERRORLEVEL%"=="0" goto :deploysolutionok
    echo Error running STSADM deploysolution command, please check log file located at %LogFile%. >> %LogFile%
    echo Error running STSADM deploysolution command, please check log file located at %LogFile%.
    goto :bigerror
:deploysolutionok

:// need to deactvate a feature before it can be updated

set Depcmd1=%stsadmpath%\stsadm -o deactivatefeature -name %DepFeatureName1% -url http://%WebSiteName% -force

echo Running the following command to unextend the http://%WebSiteName% Web Site: >> %LogFile%
echo Running the following command to unextend the http://%WebSiteName% Web Site:
echo %Depcmd1% >> %LogFile%
echo %Depcmd1%

call %Depcmd1% >> %LogFile%

:// If error with command tell user but DONT dump out of script

if "%ERRORLEVEL%"=="0" goto :deactivateok
    echo Error running STSADM deactivate command, please check log file located at %LogFile%. >> %LogFile%
    echo Error running STSADM deactivate command, please check log file located at %LogFile%.
    set ERRORLEVEL=0
:deactivateok

set RETSTS=0

:// Activate the feature

set Depcmd2=%stsadmpath%\stsadm -o activatefeature -name %DepFeatureName1% -url http://%WebSiteName%

call %Depcmd2% >> %LogFile%

:// If error with command tell user but DONT dump out of script

:// Executing the commands across the farm, this done after most commands

set cmd10=%stsadmpath%\stsadm -o execadmsvcjobs

echo Executing the commands across the farm using the command: >> %LogFile%
echo Executing the commands across the farm using the command
echo %cmd10% >> %LogFile%
echo %cmd10%

call %cmd10% >> %LogFile%

:// If error with command tell user and dump out of script

if "%ERRORLEVEL%"=="0" goto :execute4ok
    echo Error executing execadmsvcjobs4, please check log file located at %LogFile%. >> %LogFile%
    echo Error executing execadmsvcjobs4, please check log file located at %LogFile%.
    goto :bigerror
:execute4ok

://The finish line

echo.
echo.
echo +----------------------------------------------------+
echo Script is successful and did not return any errors
echo Log File located at: %LogFile%
echo +----------------------------------------------------+
echo.
echo Script is successful and did not return any errors >> %LogFile%
echo SUCCESS SUCCESS SUCCESS SUCCESS >> %LogFile%

goto :end

:bigerror
echo !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! >> %LogFile%
echo. >> %LogFile%
echo ERROR ERROR ERROR ERROR >> %LogFile%
echo A catastropic error has occured and the deployment can not continue, please check >> %LogFile%
echo error logs located at %LogFile% >> %LogFile%
echo The return status code was %RETSTS% %ERRORLEVEL% >> %LogFile%
echo. >> %LogFile%
echo !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! >> %LogFile%
echo.
echo.
echo.
echo !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
echo.
echo A catastropic error has occured and the deployment can not continue, please check
echo error logs located at %LogFile%
echo The return status code was %RETSTS% %ERRORLEVEL%
echo.
echo !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
echo.
echo.
goto :end
://////////////////////////////////////////////////
://
:// Script end.
://
://////////////////////////////////////////////////

:end

echo. >> %LogFile%
Date /T >> %LogFile%
Time /T >> %LogFile%
echo COMPLETED COMPLETED COMPLETED COMPLETED >> %LogFile%
echo. >> %LogFile%
echo. >> %LogFile%

set LogFile=
set PathtoCode=
set AppVer=
set WebSiteName=
set SiteDefName=
set PathToScripts=
set cmd1=
set cmd2=
set cmd3=
set cmd4=
set cmd5=
set cmd6=
set cmd7=
set cmd8=
set cmd9=
set cmd10=
set RETSTS=

Inside WSS 3.0

mhass — Fri, 22 Jun 2007 00:30:00 GMT

In a really weird coincidence today, I ran into a great book about WSS 3.0.

I have been busy hacking away at some old scripts that push around templates, etc on the file system for WSS and MOSS. The goal is to take a build from Team Foundation Server (TFS) and be able to deploy it to dev, test or production. I knew that WSS 3.0 allows you to deploy solutions using STSADM, so my famous old WSS 2.0 scripts could be truncated to just invoke stsadm on the different site collections.

I started poking around MSDN and found some great articles:

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb530302.aspx
http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb530301.aspx
http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa544500.aspx

At the bottom, some astute developer added some sample code, which was great news. Who is this developer? Low and behold, it is my friend Dan Larsen, whom I worked with on several projects that included WSS/SPS 2.0 Internet facing sites for some really big telcos.

At the exact same time I was reading the MSDN stuff, one of our developers came to my desk to discuss some MOSS 2007 deployment stuff and mentioned this great book they had upstairs. One of the authors of "Inside Microsoft® Windows® SharePoint® Services 3.0" is none other that Dan Larsen. Some weird planetary alignment all pointed to Dan today. The developers upstairs all were raving over how in depth this book was, that just came out this month.

Dan also has a great Visual Studio Template for deployment and Ajax Toolkit up on codeplex that allows you to create WSP packages.

Congrats Dan, and thanks for the nod in the book!

Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007 cool things

mhass — Sun, 30 Jul 2006 16:28:00 GMT

I have been doing weird, wacky things with SharePoint for the last two years to help customers use it as their Internet facing portal. Through these experiences and tribulations, I have developed my own list of “things to hate about SharePoint Internet/Extranet facing portals”. Working with big customers and doing these weird things, attracts the attention of the product teams and fortunately I have developed a really strong working relationship with them. It seems that they have taken a lot of my customer’s complaining to heart because a lot of things are fixed in the next version.

MOSS 2007 (please insert many jokes about the name) solves a lot of things on my hate list, but there may still be a need for consultants like me. Phew, they didn’t put me out of a job yet.

** Note: MOSS 2007 is not released yet, and some of the information below is subject to change but you should be able to check all of them out in Beta2 **

Web Part and Template Deployment

Most of my feedback has been around high availability of SharePoint, specifically deploying code such as web parts and templates in SPS 2003. The problem/feature is that SharePoint stores most content in a SQL database, but “code” is kept local to the box. When you have a large farm of servers, getting code to the boxes without disrupting active sessions is impossible. I wrote some complex scripts to drain IIS connections, copy web parts/templates, and start the web service again, but it is far from the seamless.

This is not completely fixed in MOSS 2007, but it is much better. Templates are now in document libraries, which are stored in SQL (ya!). Web parts are still ASP.NET 2.0 assemblies and still reside on the individual web server, but SharePoint provides a mechanism to “CAB” them and have the SharePoint deploy them for you. I really need to try this on my own, because SPS 2003 had this ability but there was a limitation that it couldn’t do some of the files we required.

That still leaves the problem of deploying the web.config and machine.config through alternate means such as script (I use WMIC to call a remote scheduled task and call VBS on a file server). Most customers that use SPS 2003 and MOSS 2007 don’t have to worry about the web.config or machine.config, but if you are using it as a platform it is something you have to solve.

Extranet Portals are a core feature in MOSS 2007

SPS 2003 was intended for Intranets only. When you try and use it for Extranet sites, you run into issues where the portal name is different than the URL you specify for the load balancer. There is an alternate name that you can use, but it can still break things like alerting and provisioning.

Well, MOSS 2007 now has Extranets as part of its core competencies and there is support for many URL’s as well as many other Extranet type features.

Infrastructure Changes to support DMZ’s

The biggest problems with putting SPS 2003 in a DMZ to make it Internet facing is that it required “Windows Authentication” to the SQL Server. This meant that you had to have SQL and AD servers in the DMZ to support SQL. You could either make swiss cheese of a your corporate perimeter firewall and put the boxes in your corporate network (not recommended) or put SQL and AD in the DMZ. If you wanted to allow employees to use SharePoint with their corporate credentials you then had to find a way to create a trust between the DMZ AD and internal AD (we recommend a cross forest trust with IPSec).

MOSS 2007 has two major things going for it to support this scenario. One, “windows Auth” is no longer required for SQL, so you can use “SQL Auth” which only requires a single port for SQL traffic. Sure, “Windows Auth” is more secure, but MOS 2007 eliminates the need for AD infrastructure in places you may not want it. Second, MOSS 2007 supports authentication against other directories such as LDAP instead of AD. Security guys are much happier to open secure LDAP traffic than they are about AD Sync or cross forest trust. For me, I still think the cross forest trust model offers the most flexibility and is secure if you use IPSec ESP-Null to pass through the corporate perimeter firewall. I got a chance to catch up and discuss this with Steve Riley this week, and hopefully he can post his thoughts on this someday.

No more Topologies

SharePoint veterans know that there are three types of SPS 2003 topologies: small, medium, and large farm. And, you have to have a certain number of web, search, index and job servers or SPS will yell at you. You can pretty much have any type of topology you want, and there are a couple new type of services that can be combine, but I won’t spoil all of MOSS’s secrets.

Content Management and Workflow

Integrating SharePoint and Content Management Server is the most important thing Microsoft could have done for this version of SharePoint. On at least two big SharePoint projects, we had to use SPS and CMS together and do stupid things like iFrame content from CMS so that we could index the pages and make it look like one big happy family.

No more tricks, it’s all in there. Workflow is there, and content management is there.

Administration Interface

The administrator console has caused a lot of pain for administrators. It was always this separate site that had a bunch of settings that you had to memorize.

It is now just another site, and all the links are searchable. Don’t know where to change the site structure? Just search for the answer because it is all indexed. Did I mention that you can also easily customize options and it is security sensitive (you won’t see items that you can’t perform)?

SharePoint storing credentials

I didn’t get a chance to ask around, but I believe the issue of SharePoint storing its own copy of credentials in its database is gone. If you recall, this causes problems when you move users from one domain to another. I will update this as I find out…

There was a lot of information, and I am honestly not doing all the cool things justice. Got something that causes you pain in SPS, let me know and I can give you an idea if it is fixed in MOSS 2007?

Domain Migration vs SharePoint

mhass — Wed, 15 Feb 2006 21:11:00 GMT

As companies get acquired or you migrate off different platforms to AD, there can be quite a mess in terms of Domains and Forests. Lots of ambitious IT folks try and keep a handle on this and consolidate domains quickly as things change. This is a great idea, and keeping things simple is definately the way to go.

What some IT folks have run into is the evil nemesis: SharePoint. Specifically the fact that SharePoint keeps its own database of users based on a combination of domain\username and SID. When a user is migrated from domain to domain, both the domainname\username and SID change and SharePoint needs to be updated or there will be a mismatch of SharePoint’s database and Portal, Team and MySite ACL’s won’t be accurate making them inaccessible.

Alas, SPS and WSS SP2 expose a migrate function in the API. STSADM.EXE has a migrateuser switch that allows you to migrate WSS users. SPS of course rarely supplies any meaningful command line tools for migration. But, Keith Richie has written a tool called SPSUserUtil, included on the SharePoint Utility Suite that uses the object model to allow you to migrate users from the command line.

In our scenario, we were migrating batches of users every night and needed to make a smooth transition within SharePoint. So, we ran through these basic steps each night:

The AD guys supplied a list of accounts (text file) that will be moved each night in domainname\username format Call the file: PhaseNUsers.txt

Prep the accounts in AD using a tool from Quest Software that copies the account to the new domain, migrates SID history and disables the account in the new domain.

Run SPSUserUtil against the SPS Infrastructure to get a list of users for all portals. Repeat this process for each portal by replacing the URL with the real URL, because of a small bug in Keith’s app you need to run it both on the top site and subsites and combine them together. Command line examples:

Main Site: SPSUserUtil.exe -o analyze -url http://companyweb -usermap mainportal.xml –r

SubSites: SPSUserUtil.exe -o analyze -url http://companyweb -usermap subsites.xml -r –ac

Concatenate mainportal.xml with subsites.xml to form PhaseNSPS.xml

We wrote a small parsing app that runs through the XML output from the steps above and edits the newloginname="" field with the new domain credentials. Example of our app:

SPSUserXML.exe PhaseNSPS.xml PhaseNNewUsers.xml PhaseNUsers.txt NEWDOMAINNAME

Now that you have an XML file with the new domain name, run SPSUserUtil against the SPS Infrastructure using the following command:

SPSUserUtil.exe -o migrate -url http://companyweb -usermap PhaseNNewUsers.xml

Validate SPS, Team sites, and MySites are working with one of the migrated users.

Make sure and test this in your scenario, but it should give you a jumpstart on fighting with SharePoiont during domain consolidations.

Changes to SharePoint 2003 Installs

mhass — Thu, 26 Jan 2006 00:54:00 GMT

I recently worked on another SharePoint project where we did unusual things with SharePoint. But, this time we actually used some of the core SPS functionality like search to index about 5,000 documents for a call center.

We built out Production last week and were doing some testing and discovered that search was broken. We could see in the Search Settings page that we were getting an error: “An error occurred attempting to connect to the index server”. What made this even stranger was that I had just done a full SPS Restore, including the index, which meant the topology was correct and communicating well.

Turns out that after Windows Service Pack 1, security changed and there are new requirements for the service account used for Application Pools. Here are the two changes:

1) The SPS service administrator account was not added in the admin group on the servers in farm. Originally, the SPS documentation stated this user needed to be a local “Power User”. This is documented in Q555309.

2) The SPS website application pool account was not added to the DCOM users group on all the servers in farm. Apparently this is not documented in a Q article (not sure why), but this is required for search.

Lastly, our search is still broken because I specified the name of the web site: https://myapp.mycorp.com. We hadn’t generated the SSL cert yet, so when the crawler tried to index the site, it doesn’t exist.

These provided to you free of charge as a public service. 8)

Hosted Messaging and Collaboration 3.5 released today

mhass — Mon, 28 Nov 2005 18:56:00 GMT

This morning, Microsoft announced version 3.5 of the Solution for Hosted Messaging and Collaboration (the product formerly known as HVMC). The latest version of the solution incorporates new mobile synchronization capabilities, a variety of security enhancements, and new tools that lessen management time and extend customer acquisition opportunities for hosting partners. As always, the solution includes engineered tools and guidance on hosting Windows, Exchange, SharePoint, and LCS.

The official press release is here.

New Stuff:

§ Windows Server 2003 SP1 support

§ Automated password synchronization between hoster directories and end-customer accounts

§ New customer migration tools and updates to key technology components

§ Exchange SP2 support

§ Direct push technology (similar to Blackberry devices)

§ New mobile security features include the ability to wipe data from devices that have been lost or stolen and set up automated rules to help prevent access by unauthorized users

Small Business Server 2003 Upgrade from Hell

mhass — Thu, 03 Nov 2005 06:32:00 GMT

Last week, I decided to take a few vacation days and fly out to Ogden, Utah to help my wife’s old company upgrade from Small Business Server (SBS) 2000 to SBS 2003. They are a small, 10 person operation that manufactures high end ski and board apparel (www.descente.net or www.ridedna.com). The have a main office in downtown Ogden, a warehouse about 5 blocks away and a Canadian office in Vancouver.

The primary reason for the upgrade is that the president now resides in Canada, and his mailbox is back in Ogden. OWA is great, but it times out and the Exchange 2000 version was not the best and fastest interface. So, RPC/HTTP aka Outlook over the Internet is the perfect solution! BTW, his laptop runs Windows XP Japanese as well as Office 2000/Outlook 2003 Japanese but when I sit down it almost looks like I can read Japanese because I have almost everything memorized, I was often asked by other employees if I spoke Japanese.

Anyway, SBS has always meant in my mind “super tight integration of Microsoft Infrastructure products and a super easy GUI for non-computer type people to manage their business”. Of course another way of saying this is “I am going to hate using the SBS tools, please god give me normal MMC consoles”. I also thought, “what a simple upgrade this is going to be, should I fly out or can I do it over VPN if someone sites there on the phone with me”. Flying turned out to be a godsend.

First of all, support calls for Microsoft employees are not free. We either have to pay, or we get 3 Quick Assist calls that we can give to people. These are mainly meant to give to the guys that stop you and say, “Hey you work for Microsoft? I have Windows 98’ and I can’t print to this HP LaserJet II, can you help?” In this case, I needed all three Quick Assists and didn’t have any with me so I bummed a couple from coworkers.

Here are the highlights:

Support Call 1:

SBS upgrade halted, keeps insisting that “All domain controllers could not be contacted”. Some braniac when the system was first installed decided to implement a second DC on some old hardware. The hardware failed shortly after installation and AD was never cleaned up.

I made sure that all the roles were seized by their primary DC (they were). And I tried to delete the DC out of the domain, no luck. I used NTDSUTIL, ADSI Edit, DNS srv records, everything was gone, but it still insisted that “All domain controllers could not be contacted”.

Support ended up finding a way around this little check in the upgrade process and we were able to continue with the upgrade.

Support Call 2:

ISA 2004 is included in on the Technologies disk of SBS 2004 Premium Edition. They don’t’ advertise that, but I feel it is critical because the ISA 2004 GUI is worlds better than ISA 2000/Proxy Server 2.0.

During the install, ISA would bomb out with a .Net runtime error. It appeared that ISA completed installing itself and the MSDE for ISA, but it never installed the rules for SBS.

Turns out that the SBS wrapper around ISA 2004 forces it to utilize some of the SBS Admin tools that get installed. The Admin tools were never installed during the upgrade, and I never unselected them. To me, there must be a bug in the upgrade process or they purposely defaulted them not to be installed.

After installing SBS admin tools, I reran ISA setup and it went through fine.

Support Call 3:

After a long debate with SSL certs because for some reason their old SSL cert didn’t correctly move over to the Windows 2003 certificate store, I had to have the cert authority reissue it.

After reissue, I imported it into both IIS and used it for the web listener in ISA. It is a cert from www.xramp.com that has a public cert authority at very reasonable prices.

After OWA, OMA, and EAS were working, I decided to tackle RPC/HTTP for the president and their warehouse. By this time, I had flown back home and I built a Windows XP Virtual Server image and joined it to their domain to test RPC/HTTP. I VPN’d in from my Virtual Server image, joined the domain and got standard MAPI over TCP/IP working, cool! I disconnected the VPN, and setup the RPC/HTTP proxy settings on the client, and I new that the Outlook settings were correct and the certs were good, but it wouldn’t connect. It kept prompting me for login credentials.

Support traced the problem to the “Proxy Authentication Settings” being set to NTLM Authentication, for SBS apparently it must use Basic Authentication. The support tech also claimed that you can’t hit the “Check Name” button when you use RPC/HTTP, which I knew for a fact not to be an issue when you initially create the profile with TCP/IP. I tested this, and there isn’t an issue if you create a profile when you have the full MAPI TCP/IP connection, and later add RPC/HTTP.

Summary:

I am disappointed that this wasn’t as smooth as an update as I expected. Again, SBS is targeted at business of 100 or less people that probably don’t have a full time IT person, or have access to $295 per incident support from Microsoft.

In dealing with the SBS products, there seems to be a GUI that has simplified administrative tasks, but the underlying technology seems to still be hobbled together. Many of the products are wrapped or functionality is hidden/taken away, and don’t appear to be engineered from the beginning to work together on a single server. Overall, I highly recommend SBS 2003 especially since the premium edition includes ISA 2004. But, I think that we need to have the SBS teams sit in early on Windows, Exchange/Office, ISA, and SQL engineering design sessions and architect those products to operate better together on a single box to give SBS the reliability and ease of updates it deserves.

Microsoft Support from India

mhass — Fri, 28 Oct 2005 04:41:00 GMT

I admit it, I am not the all-knowing Microsoft consultant I should be. The real truth is, our support folks have the best tools to diagnose problems a lot faster than I can muddle through things.

I have had the occasion over the last few weeks to call Microsoft Support (PSS) several times with issues around SQL, AD, SharePoint and Small Business Server. Every single time, I was routed to someone in India. The support was phenomenal (as always), but what was more impressive was the language skills and how hip the support guys were on the other end of the phone, especially for being so far from the US. I think my expectation was that I would still receive good support, but a bit of a language barrier as well as some bias to culture.

Next time you call in, I bet you won’t be able where the person is located that is helping you fix your issue.

RSS for SharePoint

mhass — Mon, 29 Aug 2005 17:40:00 GMT

Dan Larson just published his RSS plugin for SharePoint. Dan has done some awesome work on his own, as well as contract for us at Microsoft Consulting Services. He has a great web site at portalbuilder.org that has some cool tools and framework that leverages the SPS object model.

He is currently working for newsgator.com but still does a lot of independent development and puts most of his stuff up on gotdotnet.

Another SharePoint Project begins

mhass — Thu, 30 Jun 2005 16:52:00 GMT

I am off to St. Louis next week to start another SharePoint project. I have become known in our group here at Microsoft for these types of projects because we “bend” SharePoint in a way that it was not designed out of the box. A lot of customers are using SharePoint to write WebParts for their applications, and use very few of the “real” SharePoint functionality. Visual Studio 2005 lets WebParts go native, but if you want to do something right now, you need to use SharePoint WSS or SPS. Although we don’t overstep any supportability boundaries, using SharePoint and having to move code such as pages and WebParts is not what SharePoint was designed to do.

Dan Larson has a great site that goes into more details about these challenges and actually supplies source code to build utilities that let you extract and restore individual document libraries and object within SharePoint. There are third party apps that can do this, but they are usually around backup and restore, where Dan’s stuff is more for development and is callable from a command line so I can wrap it with deployment scripts.

SharePoint SP2 (WSS)

mhass — Tue, 21 Jun 2005 16:05:00 GMT

I can't wait for it, I need it now. Service Pack 2 for SharePoint is available in the Beta of Windows Server 2003 R2 (the interim release of Windows between 2003 and longhorn).

The two enhancments everyone has gotta have are:

Support for IP-bound virtual servers

Previous releases of Windows SharePoint Services did not support assigning a static IP address to an IIS virtual server extended with Windows SharePoint Services. Instead, it was required that you used host headers and configured all virtual servers with an IP address setting of All Unassigned. This limitation, as described in KB article Q830342, prevented being able to host multiple SSL-enabled virtual servers on one Web server. In Service Pack 2, this limitation has been removed, and Windows SharePoint Services now supports assigning a static IP address to a virtual server extended with Windows SharePoint Services. Windows SharePoint Services Service Pack 2 will not support IP-bound virtual servers if it was deployed in scalable hosting mode, as described in the Server Farm with Multiple Hostnames Deployment topic of the Windows SharePoint Services Administrator’s Guide. IP-bound virtual server support is only available when Windows SharePoint Services Service Pack 2 is deployed in non-scalable hosting mode.

Support for advanced extranet configurations

Windows SharePoint Services generates some hyperlinks in its Web pages and e-mail messages using absolute URLs. Earlier releases of Windows SharePoint Services generated those absolute URLs using the protocol scheme, host, and port of the Web request that SharePoint received or the URL used to originally create the site. This prevented Windows SharePoint Services from supporting certain advanced extranet configurations where a reverse proxy server is deployed in front of the SharePoint server.

Phew, now I can have multiple SharePoint portals on the same box, assigned to different IP addresses, you know like god intended it. Not to mention I can now have ISA sit in front of SharePoint and do some link translation without having to worry about URL's not matching what the user is expecting on Lists and SharePoint generated email.

No delivery date yet, but at least it is in print, more details at: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=ABBA20F2-3625-4C9C-A412-AB9BBEBDB5E8&displaylang=en