8/10/2010I had the privilege last year of attending the Best Practices Conference in Washington, DC. It was a great conference, full of good information delivered by some of the most dynamic speakers I’ve ever heard. The next Best Practices Conference in Washington, DC is August 24-26. This year, I have been given the opportunity to speak. I am both honored and humbled to be presenting alongside some of the world renowned experts that will be speaking there. To be certain, if you have never attended the Best Practices Conference, it is very similar to other conferences in that you have a ton of knowledge crammed into a short time. The difference that I found with the Best Practices Conference was that it was more about WHY something should or should not be done than what you can or can’t do or even how. Let’s be honest, those of us who work with SharePoint know that if we really wanted to, we could probably make SharePoint do most anything we want it to do, especially with some duct tape and maybe (and its a BIG maybe!) a developer or two at our disposal! However, what you will learn at this conference is that while you CAN, you may or may not WANT to do just anything with SharePoint. I have a mental “wish list” of conferences that I like to attend and have attended. The Best Practices Conference is one of the ones that I have on the top of my list. I am looking forward to this year’s conference, not only because I’m speaking, but also because I will be working with an amazing group of people. I have been given a very special opportunity to help organize a group called “Women in SharePoint.” Women in SharePoint is an organization that is working to encourage women who work in IT, specifically with SharePoint. One goal is to encourage more young women to consider IT fields and mentor those who wish to do so. The organization, while focused on encouraging women does not exclude men from the efforts, but encourages them to get involved as well by mentoring, encouraging, and supporting women in the same field. Women in SharePoint is working with Bamboo Nation to coordinate the live-blogging of the Best Practices Conference. Anyone can live blog! If you haven’t, I encourage you to register for the Best Practices Conference. It will be a great event and you won’t want to miss it. If you are already registered for the conference, register to help live blog! Above all, be sure to have a great time there, and come find me if you can! Happy SharePointing! 7/27/2010I had the privilege recently to go with a team from my church on a mission trip to Jamaica. It was not to a resort area, and was definitely not a vacation. We had no hot water at the place where we stayed although I didn’t miss it at all! We worked daily with a local church in Mandeville, Jamaica to do vacation Bible school for kids during the day and revival services at night. It was both a challenge and a blessing. Needless to say, I had zero contact with anyone from the U.S. for 7 full days, and honestly didn’t miss my cell phone ringing or getting email very much at all. However, when I got home, it was right back into the swing of things and working hard at catching up on what had been going on while I was away. It took a few days to get back in the swing of things, and I think I might have finally caught up with myself, but it’s been a challenge. As I was playing catch up at work, a friend of mine was trying to get a server to catch up. The server was one of two load balanced web front end servers in a SharePoint 2007 farm. At some point, the SharePoint services had been all turned off on this server for some troubleshooting and they had not been turned on for quite some time. During this time solutions were deployed, new web applications and sites had all been created. So I was asked “How do I get this back to normal?” There were lots of theories that sprung to mind, and I shared a couple of them, then thought, well, why do we have to make it hard. When a new web front end is added to an existing farm, all of that stuff is put on it automatically. So why not remove it from the farm using the SharePoint Products and Technologies Configuration Wizard and add it back? My friend tried it and boom… all solutions, web applications and sites were there and load balanced again! The steps are pretty simple. Run the configuration wizard on the server that you want to remove from the farm and it will ask “do you want to remove this server from the farm” and you can select to do that. Then run it again and you will be prompted to create a new farm or join an existing one. When you join an existing one, you will need to know the database server where the configuration database exists for that farm along with the configuration database name and the account that central administration uses to be able to connect. Pretty simple solution for what seemed at first like it would take quite some time to correct. Happy SharePointing! 7/8/2010Yeah, I know… I’m nothing like the Old Spice guy, but I still think that is a great commercial. No, the title has nothing to do with the content of this post, and I’m not really looking to make it fit, it just happens to be what popped into my head when I started writing this. So I totally thought I would have some time to blog between the end of April and now, and actually, I probably had a few minutes here and there, and the thoughts have crossed my mind many times. I just seem to be in the middle of something else when it does. I’ve been busy working for Summit 7 Systems doing SharePoint upgrades, migrations, analysis, you name it…. I’ve also been working on a mission trip. I’m leaving in the morning at 1AM for a trip to Mandeville, Jamaica for a week. Don’t think this is a vacation, while it will be fun, it will also be lots of hard work, in very primitive conditions. I’m not even going to have the luxury of hot water for the entire trip! Since this week is a short one with a holiday (Happy 4th of July everyone, hope you had a wonderful day!) and with me leaving, I was given a very small project to build some virtual machines that we can use for demos. This is not such a bad thing, I have built a couple of VMs in the past, both of 2007 and 2010 for me to play with and to use when I am doing presentations. I’m slaving away working on these virtual machines, when I am realizing I’m going to have to do some almost dev-type stuff! WHAT??? I’m an admin and I’m installing Visual Studio 2010???? Seriously? Ok… well, so I think to myself, I’m just installing the software for others to be able to use, right? It’s still kind of an administrative thing, right? I’m talking myself into this and realizing I just have to bite the bullet and do it. Well let me just tell you, only those devs know the tricks to doing this. About 45 minutes into the installation, I’ve had to reboot, cause it said it needed to, and I’m looking at the list of stuff that it is doing and its not even half way through it!!! I’m thinking, “Oh my… what the heck is taking so long!?!?!” So I mention to my wonderful friend and (yes, I know but I still call her friend) DEV, Becky Isserman, that it is taking forever. Her response, (and this is an exact quote) “Did you uncheck a ton of stuff?” Why no, thank you, I had no idea I had to customize the installation of a dev tool. I thought it had everything you had to have to be able to develop in SharePoint 2010. Well, apparently you are supposed to uncheck some of the stuff, like C++, Visual Basic, SQL Server Express, F#, J# and possibly more to make it install a little less slowly. So I told my friend, yes, still calling a dev a friend! Thanks for letting me know that now and that there should be a manual or simple guide somewhere to let people know how to install it specifically for SharePoint users. Well, since that doesn’t exist, I’m posting this quick blog in the hopes that some other admin who gets stuck installing Visual Studio 2010 for some devs will know next time (which means this will be me, I’m sure) what to do to make it not take so long! Oh, and it’s been over an hour now and still not halfway through yet! Happy SharePointing! 4/28/2010It seems anytime things get a little crazy, my blog is the first thing that suffers. I am sorry I have neglected you old friend! Suffice it to say, there has been a lot of changes taking place. I have started a new position as Senior Consultant with Summit 7 Systems. I am excited about the opportunity that has been presented to me and look forward to the challenges and new adventures that are certain to come with it. Due to this change, I will be travelling some and with that comes more time in hotels twiddling my thumbs, so I’m sure during those times I’ll be able to blog more! Or at least, I will try… when I’m not exploring whatever new city I’m visiting! The Gowin household has been extremely busy of late adjusting to the new position and baseball has started, so it seems we are at the ball park every day of the week! This has also left me little time to sit down and play with technology for a while so that I can make sure my posts are accurate for all of my loyal readers, you know who you are! Now for some interesting news. I was privileged to speak at SharePoint Saturday Atlanta on April 17th. It was an all-star event, and one that is near and dear to my heart, as it pretty much represents my induction into the SharePoint community. I presented on a new topic for me, SharePoint 2010. I enjoyed it and surprisingly, received good feedback, even when half of my demos decided to fail on me! Thanks to Dan Attis, Ron Jones, Lee Reed and more who put on a great event! I look forward to it next year. I am also speaking (very last minute) at SharePoint Saturday Huntsville on May 1! You should all make plans to attend! There were so many good speakers who applied, the number of sessions was increased to make sure that there is plenty of good content for everyone to enjoy. Last but not least, my blogs are now going to be cross-posted to a blog on the Summit 7 Systems site. So now you will have 2 ways to find me! 3/18/2010So a few weeks ago I was working on an issue when my cohort Mark Rackley said something to the effect of “How do you solve this problem with SharePoint?” Being so afflicted with Musical ADD, I immediately starting rearranging the lyrics to a song in my head. The song was “How do you Solve a Problem Like Maria” from The Sound of Music, and the lyrics that popped into my head were “How do you solve a problem like SharePoint, how do you put a stop to looping code…” you get the picture. I mentioned this to Mark and we got a little laugh out of it during the stressful time and SharePoint: The Musical was born. We mentioned this in conversation a few times, but it really got me thinking. So below is my version of SharePoint: The Musical, 80’s edition compilation CD. 1. “Don’t You Know what SharePoint Can Do?” This song is used when marketing SharePoint to your business. It is adapted from the song “Don’t You Know what the Night Can Do?” by Steve Winwood. 2. “Get Outta My Email, Get into SharePoint” Sung by all of us who know and love SharePoint when someone refuses to use a document workspace and sends their 10MB spreadsheet to teams of people for review. Adapted from “Get Outta My Dreams, Get into My Car” by Billy Ocean. 3. “SharePoint is Gonna Get You” is another one of those marketing songs you’ll be singing to yourself when people are wondering, “What is this SharePoint thing?” Adapted from “Rhythm is Gonna Get You” by Gloria Estefan and Miami Sound Machine. 4. “Saving all my Docs for You” is the song that will be stuck in your head when you create document workspaces, libraries, and document repositories. Adapted from “Saving all my Love for You” by Whitney Houston. 5. For all you SharePint-ers there’s “Pour Some SharePoint On Me.” Adapted from the classic Def Leppard song “Pour Some Sugar On Me.” 6. “SharePoint Drives Me Crazy” is just the song you are looking for when you get frustrated (and you will) with something SharePoint does or doesn’t do that you don’t want or want it to do. You will know it well, it is adapted from “She Drives Me Crazy” by Fine Young Cannibals. 7. At some point after you have sung the previous song, you will begin humming “Devil Inside” by INXS. No real adaptation needed there, because at times, you will definitely feel like SharePoint has the Devil Inside!!! 8. Shortly after singing “Devil Inside” you will begin singing “Never Surrender” by Corey Hart. Again, not much adaptation needed, because you can and will conquer SharePoint and make it behave the way you want it! 9. In honor of SharePoint’s fabulous search capabilities, we have included U2’s “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For” for your listening pleasure. Sing it with a smile, knowing, you can help with that problem! 10. And last but not least, with the soon-to-be released SharePoint 2010, we have “Like a Version” adapted from the fabulous “Like a Virgin” by Madonna. Because well, we all know, everyone wants a new version, right? So there’s my compilation of 80’s SharePoint songs, I know there are more. Feel free to leave me your suggestions for the next compilation CD! 3/2/2010I work with a large team of developers currently and am the only SharePoint Administrator. There are consistently several projects in development and QA at a time. I have been working on trying to keep these projects from interfering with each other as well as ease of deployment from one environment to another. I have created a very short (5 questions) survey for administrators who may be facing the same situation. I would appreciate if you would take a few moments to complete the survey here. I will share all of the results and probably post more about this in the future. Thank you! 2/18/2010Recently I learned that even experienced administrators make boneheaded mistakes. Yes, you guessed it, yours truly made a crazy mistake. It took me a while to figure out it was actually me, but I did finally figure it out. Let me set the scene for you. I’m working hard and moving a site from the development farm (single server) to the QA/Testing farm. Standard procedures, right? I backed up the site using a method I’ll detail later in this post on the dev server, copied the files to the app server of the QA farm and then attempted to restore them (again, I’ll detail this shortly) and got this strange error: Your backup is from a different version of Windows SharePoint Services and cannot be restored to a server running the current version. The backup file should be restored to a server with version '1178817357.0.45671568.0' or later. So of course I begin checking my versions on the farms. I went into Central Administration on both farms and went to the Operations tab and clicked on “Servers in Farm” in each farm. Both of them were the same: 12.0.0.6504 for all servers in each farm. Hmmm… that weird version number was throwing me. So I thought I’d do a search for the error. Nothing, nada, zip, zilch, you get the picture. There were some similar, but nothing with those exact numbers. The odd thing was, that those results that were similar talked about using a SQL backup and trying to restore that using stsadm. Well that’s odd, right? I know I used an stsadm command on both servers. What’s the deal? Then it hit me. I backed up the site using stsadm –o export –url http://sitename –filename d:\sitename.dat. And what was I using to try to restore? You guessed it: stsadm –o restore –url http://qasitename –filename d:\sitename.dat. Okay, wow… bonehead mistake. In order to use the export operation, you have to use import to bring it back in to your new site. In order to use the restore operation you have to have a file that was created using backup instead of export! Really unusual that it would give you the error that seems to indicate that it was the wrong version of SharePoint instead of the wrong type of file. Once I used the correct operation, the site imported correctly and all was well. 1/12/2010In this super secret mission that I undertake - that’s right call me double-oh eight, a little curvier than James Bond, but still licensed to kill - a custom web part was developed to look at the “My Tasks” view of a particular tasks list and display that information and perform some actions based on this view. However, when the new web part was deployed from the developer’s personal virtual machine to the dev machine for further testing, it didn’t perform as expected. After several bouts of troubleshooting, it was determined that the “My Tasks” view template, not the view itself, was causing issues with the functionality of the custom web part. After much research, I found a way to remove that view template for the dev machine. This should NOT be attempted in production or used in production at all as it involves modifying the file in the 12 hive. We are still working on a way to either make a feature that will remove this without affecting the tasks lists definition or will create a new definition of a tasks list that can be used that does not include the view templates. This is strictly blackops and should not be attempted by mere mortals, I will disavow all knowledge of and responsibility for your mission. In this view, you can see the links that point to creating a new view from the view templates. This is out of the box, and not a view that is already created. 
After much searching, I found the definition of the tasks list here: c:\program files\common files\ microsoft shared\web server extensions\12\TEMPLATE\FEATURES\TasksList\Tasks\schema.xml. This xml file was not easy for me to decipher, but I found out from a member of my vast spy network, Becky Isserman, that I could open this in Visual Studio and it would make much more sense. Oh my, she was right! You can collapse and expand nodes of the xml file so that you can see only what you need to see. Now, to figure out what you need to see… 
This was not as hard as I thought it would be. It involved 2 things, both searching the xml file and looking at the tasks list through the browser. A search of the xml file for the view name My Tasks takes you to a particular node of the file, but is this the right one? When I went to the tasks list in the browser and went to Create a View, then found My Tasks in the Start from a view template section. I right-clicked on it and copied the shortcut and pasted it to notepad. At the very end of the link you will see: BaseViewID=2. This helped as each view that was in the xml file was labeled with the base view ID number! I quickly found the node and collapsed all of the other nodes of the xml file that were views leaving only this one expanded. EWWW… 1147 lines of xml for this view! So I did what any good admin would do, I made a quick snapshot of my VM, copied and pasted the lines into notepad for safekeeping, and deleted the lines, all 1147 of them. Then I reset IIS and surveyed my handiwork. This BROKE every tasks list already in existence (thus the reason you do NOT use this in production, along with modifying the 12 hive!). However, when I created a new tasks list, there were no view templates, and this solved that issue. I deleted the new tasks list, added the 1147 lines back to the xml file and rest IIS again. All of the pre-existing tasks lists worked again. So, now the next assignment is to find a good developer to write something to keep these 1147 lines from messing up a custom web part, that should be an easy mission, right? 12/23/2009I have spoken at a couple of SharePoint Saturdays on using SharePoint’s web services in InfoPath to create no code solutions. I have been asked by some of the people who saw me recently at SharePoint Saturday DC to upload the demos and slides. Please note that none of these demos have sound. I explained the process as I presented them. I have finally been able to get them all uploaded, so without further ado… The slides for my presentation: InfoPath and Web Services. Demo #1 Designing a form based on a Web Service Demo #2 Creating a connection in a blank form Demo #3 Preview the data with drag and drop Demo #4 Add attachments to list items Demo #5 Create a site Demo #6 Part 1: Auto populating information about the currently logged in user This information is also detailed here. Demo #6 Part 2: Adding the contact selector This demo as well as the next demo can also be found in detail here. Demo #6 Part 3: Auto populating another user’s information 12/3/2009Recently I was faced with a situation that I know many will be faced with in the coming months and years. An initiative has been placed to conserve both money and physical space in most organizations. As this and disaster recovery has become more and more important, virtualization has become a big issue and many are moving toward making most, if not all, of their servers virtual servers. I have no issue with this, to a point. I won’t go into all of the pros and cons of virtualizing the different parts of SharePoint. My personal opinion is that virtualizing adds overhead to your servers, so if it makes sense and isn’t causing an issue, do it, if it doesn’t make sense and causes issues, don’t do it. My one exception to this is SQL for SharePoint. I am not in favor of virtualizing SQL for SharePoint, at least in larger farms. It adds enough overhead that you usually see some decrease in throughput or increase in latency or both. But personal opinions aside, this was the situation I was facing. To virtualize SQL or not to virtualize SQL for a SharePoint deployment? In the course of my studying up on this, I conducted kind of an informal poll on twitter, email, and IM. I received a lot of great information and opinions on the subject from MVPs, experts, and even Microsoft employees. Thanks to Woody Windischman for posting a great article about it after I included him in my poll. So after talking with everyone and getting a pretty general consensus that most people wouldn’t virtualize SQL in most deployments, it made me think about what makes a best practice. Do we consider not virtualizing SQL a best practice because 22 of the 25 people I polled wouldn’t do it, and the others only under specific circumstances? A best Practice is defined as: the best way to do something: the most effective or efficient method of achieving an objective or completing a task according to the Encarta World English Dictionary. Is there only one best way? Is it a best practice if it doesn’t work for your organization? Some experts think that best practices are non-negotiable, some think that they are not hard and fast rules so much as guidelines that should be used to help you make the best decisions. I am now of the opinion that a best practices is the best way in your situation of making things work. Your organization will have initiatives, and goals that may not include IT (I’m not speaking to you IT consulting firms, this doesn’t apply to you). They may have cost savings initiatives that require server consolidation, which may include virtualizing SQL, even if you think it isn’t the best thing for the SharePoint farm, it could be the best thing for the overall company goals. This holds true for other “best practices” you may need to implement. Present the pros and cons that you have researched and state your opinion, but don’t take it personally if the opinion of the company is to do the opposite of what you would prefer. You have stated your case, and they are willing to accept the risks. All you can do at that point is be prepared with a plan to recover if needed. Hey, it could surprise you, they may be willing to wait a little longer for a page to load if it can save them $50,000. Heck, I might be willing, too! Happy SharePointing! |
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Lori Gowin
SharePoint Administrator
Lori is a SharePoint Administrator who has been working with SharePoint and InfoPath technologies for over 5 years. When not focusing on SharePoint, Lori unwinds watching sports and spending time with her husband and children. |
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