Apologies for the gap in posts, we've been v. busy - honest.  We've been talking to SharePoint engineer teams in the US and decided to pool our resources and have a global blog that all engineers could post to. 

So we are moving from Technet.  Lawrence Liu has created us a MOSS blog site on the official SharePoint community site called 'From The Field' - you can find it here: http://sharepoint.microsoft.com/blogs/fromthefield/default.aspx  The idea is the same, SharePoint war stories from the field by Microsoft engineers.  This time there will be more engineers posting and they could be from anywhere in the world. 

We won't be posting here any more, thanks for reading.

CU

SharePoint users at my customers' site were complaining the other day that any Office 2003 documents would not load from a SharePoint 2003 site through IE 6.  In fact IE would just freeze up and then have to be closed with extreme force.  All other non office documents were fine.

The clients were Windows XP SP1 and not all of them were having the problem.  Comparing clients that did work with ones that crashed showed that there was an inconsistency with the hot-fixes that had been applied.  Clients with the problem did not have KB925486, a security patch for IE 6, installed.  We installed it, rebooted and the problem as gone.  This patch was released a while ago but subsequent patches had caused the problem.

Foxit PDF IFilter is designed to help users index a large number of PDF document and then quickly find text within these documents.  The PDF document include files, emails with attachments or database records.

 Download here : http://www.foxitsoftware.com/pdf/ifilter/index.html#downloadifilter

Bill Baer has started a series of blogs on the subject of SQL 2005 Mirroring as one solution for failover and disaster recovery. Part one covers and intro and the basic concepts in excellent technical depth.

You can find the article here : http://blogs.technet.com/wbaer/archive/2007/04/23/sql-server-2005-database-mirroring-and-windows-sharepoint-services-3-0-microsoft-office-sharepoint-server-2007-part-1-introduction-overview-and-basics.aspx

I don’t know about everyone else out there but something I get asked all the time about MOSS is to provide some indication of performance on hardware platforms. Well HP have (once again) done the donkey work for us and produced a fairly comprehensive white paper here :  

http://h71019.www7.hp.com/ActiveAnswers/cache/497613-0-0-0-121.html

A good read all round in my opinion

I’d just like to let you know about the SharePoint pavilion that we are running as part of Internet World happening next week from 1^st – 3^rd of May, showcasing solutions from some of our best SharePoint ECM partners.

You can register for free on the Internet World Site.

For a full agenda take a peek here : http://www.internetworld.co.uk/microsoft-sharepoint-pavilion.html 

Here is a list of some of the Microsoft partners that will be taking part:

Combined Knowledge specialises in the exclusive training on SharePoint Server and Windows SharePoint Services. Our courses meet the needs of any role involved in a SharePoint environment.
 
 

Content and Code is a leading Microsoft Gold Partner specialising in Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 solutions and other NET technologies. Content and Code has have deployed the most MOSS 2007 implementations in the UK.

Noticed for Forefront Engineering Team have started a blog this month.

Forefront is the server side anti-virus solution for SharePoint and Exchange.  It scans documents as they are up and down loaded from SharePoint.   

If you interested in seeing what Forefront can do, take the Forefront Virtual Lab

My Team is pushing virtual labs as a quick and easy way for our customers to skill up on SharePoint features.  There are over 70 SharePoint related labs for anyone to take for free.  You get 90 minutes to run through the lab tasks and manual in PDF for reference.  You then follow step by step instructions to complete tasks on different clients and servers.

See the full list here:

https://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/SearchResults.aspx?culture=en-US&evtTyp=4&kwdAny=sharepoint

Enjoy - and let us know what you think of them.

My customer wanted to use the MOSS out of the box RSS web parts to use feeds from external sources, like CNN, BBC etc., as well as internal sources, a local Community Server. They ran into a few problems:

Authenticated RSS Feeds

MOSS RSS web parts only support anonymous and Kerberos authentication. When they tried to connect a local Community Server RSS feed that needed a logon they saw this message in the web part window:

The RSS Web Part does not support authenticated feeds

As far as I know you can't make a list or library anonymous in MOSS you have to do the whole site so the only way round it is to go Kerberos. Most of the time you'll use NTLM when installing MOSS because its quick and easy. In fact Kerberos is actually faster to authenticate and more secure than NTLM so it's better in the long run if you use it. With Kerberos you need to make some changes to Active Directory and some MOSS admins won't have permissions to do that. You need to get your domain admins involved.

There are two great articles about this topic:

http://blogs.msdn.com/markarend/archive/2006/10/03/RSS-Viewer-web-part-and-authenticated-feeds.aspx

http://msdn.microsoft.com/msdnmag/issues/05/09/SecurityBriefs/default.aspx

To follow this up I'm going to get some time in the virtual environment and post a step by step guide on how to use Kerberos in a medium farm. I bet you can't wait for that.

External RSS Feeds

SharePoint needs to be told if your network uses a proxy to get out on to the internet. If you try and link up a web part to an external feed without doing that you'll see this error in the web part window:

An unexpected error occurred processing your request check the logs for detail and correct problem

Not very helpful right?  You can give MOSS access to the internet by adding the proxy details to the web.config. The web.config is found in the root of the web application folder. By default that is c:\inetpub\wwwroot\wss\virtualdirectories\<web app name>. It may have been changed when it was created so use IIS Manager to check.  Edit the web.config in notepad and add the following section (bits in red are your addresses):

Warning: messing with the web.config is potentially disastrous.Make a backup.

<configuration>

<system.net>

<defaultProxy>

<proxy  bypassonlocal="true"  proxyaddress="10.1.1.1:8080"   usesystemdefault="true” />

<bypasslist>

<add address="server.fqdn.com” />

</bypasslist>

</defaultProxy>

</system.net>

</configuration>

If you use a fully qualified proxy name be sure to put http:// on the front. It doesn't seem to work without it.

You've found the blog of the UK SharePoint Dedicated Supportability Engineers (DSE) team which is part of Premier Field Engineering at Microsoft Services.

Bit of a mouthful isn't it?  When friends ask me, I normally say I'm a consultant, which is almost true.  SharePoint DSE's actually specialise in supporting SharePoint environments.  We help our customers design, build and support SharePoint according to Microsoft best practise. 

Some DSE's spend two or three days a week, for six months to a year at a time, at Premier customer sites.  Others fly all over the world, at a moments notice, and drop in like ninjas to fix Critical Situations (critsits).  

Our mission is to skill up our customer's support teams so they know as much about SharePoint as we do.  We do this through health checks, reviews, workshops, and getting involved in all the technical problems that SharePoint administrators and users have.  We want to use this blog to bring you real life stories of some of the stuff we experience out in the field.