SharePoint Secrets

what estimates can be made on the disk space requirements for Index server, Query Server and Database Server. Index server disk space requirements: To estimate the index server disk space requirements, we recommend that you use the following calculations: • Size of data crawled = Y • Size of index on index server = a range of 5% through 12% * Y = X • Initial disk space = 2.5*X. A large amount of index server disk capacity is required to accommodate backups, which must reside on the same disk as the index, and to accommodate the merge process when crawled data is merged with the index. Note: The volume of crawled data can differ based on the content source. A content source is a set of options that you can use to specify what type of content is crawled, what URLs to crawl, and how deep and when to crawl. For example, if the content source specifies file-share content, the index size can be up to 30 percent of the size of the content. Content Index Sizing: You can estimate the size...

Ran into an odd little issue this morning where users in a publishing site could not create new pages. The reason they couldn’t create a new page turned out to be because they did not have read rights on the masterpage gallery. The symptoms are basically access denied pages when any user with full control or design rights chooses to create a page in a publishing site. When they create the page they get the typical “Error: Access Denied” page and can either sign in as another user or request access. I resolved it by going to Site Actions -> Site Settings -> Modify All Site Settings . Select the option Page layouts and site templates and then select the option to Reset all subsites to inherit these preferred subsite template settings for both subsites and page layouts. This is sort of related to the publishing the default master page; an obvious permission issue.

Windows XP has a feature called "My Network Places" where you could very easily make a website folder (SharePoint folders) or FTP folders available in Windows Explorer. Windows 7 also has the feature, but it is somewhat hidden. Here’s how to make it work in Windows 7. 1. Using Internet Explorer browse to the location that you’d like to make available in Windows Explorer. 2. In SharePoint click the ‘Action’ button, and select ‘Open in Windows Explorer’ 3. A new explorer window will open. 4. Right-Click the folder that you would like to make available in Windows Explorer and select ‘Copy address as text’. 5. Right-click Computer, and click "Add a network location". 5. Click Next. 6. Select ‘Choose a custom network location’. 7. Paste in the URL copied in step 4. And, click ‘Next’. 8. Give the location a name: 9. Click ‘Finish’ 10. This new location will now be available in windows explorer by the name provided.

Problem Users report the following error when attempting to access a document library in SharePoint. An error occurred during the processing of /site/SharedDocuments/Forms/AllItems.aspx. Code blocks are not allowed in this file. Explanation Ever so often I have clients contact me with a SharePoint library fully corrupted reporting an error such as “Code blocks are not allowed in this file”. The error is, in fact, limited to a specific view but it’s usually the default view, therefore the error makes the library appear like it is completely inaccessible. The root cause of the error is simple – a user replaced a view file from the /forms/ folder of the document library, typically “AllItems.aspx” such as the screenshot below suggests. Typically this occurs when the user is using explorer view but I’ve heard of manifest presentations of this error as well. Solution – Option 1 1) Open site that contains the library 2) Click on “Site Actions” >> “Site Settings” to view the site sett...

Recently we noticed that one of our site collection's site actions menu items has no Create menu. The site actions menu has only View all site content, View Reports and Manage and Content Structure. This site collection has enabled publishing features. We found that even Farm admin/Site collection admin are not able to see "Create" menu. When we try to the URL "../_layouts/create.aspx" got access denied error message for every one including Farm admins. After we did several investigation, we found that the site collection was locked and it was in Read-Only mode. Solution: Go to Central Administration > Application Management > Site Collection Quotas and Locks Select the Site Collection and chose the correct option to unlock the site as below. Lock status for this site: Not locked Adding content prevented for Read-only (blocks additions, updates, and deletions) No access We selected the Option called "Not-Locked" after that it start...

Last week I noticed in our Production environment that the index server is running with low disk space. After that I tried to change the drive location of index. The below are the steps to change the index location: Prerequisites: · Pause all content sources that are currently crawling content. After the index has been moved to the new location we have to resume the crawl that we have paused. Change the location of the index file Perform the following steps to change the index file location. Note that this procedure copies the index to the new location – it does not delete the content index in the original location. You can choose to delete the files in the original location later in this article. 1. Log on to the index server as a member of the Administrators group. 2. Open a command prompt. 3. Type the following and then press ENTER to go to the folder that contains the stsadm.exe command-line utility. cd %COMMONPROGRAMFILES%\Microsof...

In this part of the series we will take a look at setting up authoritative pages, which allows influencing the order of results coming from different content sources. You can specify which pages have higher or lower priority when appearing in the search results by providing a rank for pages or sites. To add a site/page to Authoritative (or non-authoritative - demoted) pages: Go to Sharepoint Administration Site and click on the link under "Shared Services Administration" in the "Quick Launch" panel to open the Shared Services web site. Open the Search Settings page by clicking on the Search Settings link in the Search section of Shared Services site In the Authoritative Pages section follow the Specify Authoritative Pages link Fill out the Specify Authoritative Pages form providing the URL's for sites/pages having most and least influence on the order of search results. Most Authoritative sites: http://prod.moss.com/most_important_site Least Authoritative sites:...

A perimeter network (also known as a DMZ , demilitarized zone , and screened subnet ) is a small network that is set up separately from an organization's private network and the Internet. The perimeter network allows external users access to the specific servers located in the perimeter network while preventing access to the internal corporate network. An organization may also allow very limited access from computers in the perimeter networks to computers in the internal network. A perimeter network is commonly used for deploying the e-mail and Web servers for the company. The perimeter network can be set up in one of these configurations: Back-to-back perimeter network configuration, with two Microsoft Internet Security and Acceleration (ISA) Server computers on either side of the perimeter network. For more information, see Back-to-back perimeter network configuration . Three-homed ISA Server computer, with the perimeter network and the local network protected by the same ISA Se...

Managing SharePoint Projects Part 1 - Requirements Gathering and Analysis , talks about the art of gathering & analyzing requirements for SharePoint projects. In this post, I share my industry experience in handling customers, gathering requirements, setting expectations right and documenting requirements, so as to do things right the first time. 1. Project Roles/Structure: The Business Development officer/Sales rep gets the project for the organization, he knows "What SharePoint can do and how it fits in the client requirements", he bids and gets the contract for the company, then interacts with the Delivery Manager to get the project done. The Delivery manager has many projects to deliver under his department/region umbrella, so he passes it on to the Project Manager and gives him full authority and control over the project. The Project manager has a SharePoint team in place to implement SharePoint projects. the team structure for a medium to large project implementatio...

One day you decide you feel like searching your SharePoint 2007 site for some content and you come across the following errors: On the site page: The search request was unable to connect to the Search Service. In the event log: Event Type: Error Event Source: Office Server Search Event Category: Content index server Event ID: 4127 Date: 08/01/2009 Time: 20:41:13 User: N/A Computer: SERVER01 Description: Content index on Portal_Content could not be initialized. Error The content index is corrupt. 0xc0041800.Component: 1a42c22a-da49-4651-80ab-99f19176ac8a For more information, see Help and Support Center at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/events.asp. ---- Event Type: Warning Event Source: Office Server Search Event Category: Search service Event ID: 10039 Date: 08/01/2009 Time: 20:43:42 User: N/A Computer: SERVER01 Description: Retry of query machine ‘SERVER01′ has failed with error: The object is not initialzed. 0×8004180b. It will be retried again in 900 seconds. ...

The following is an illustration accompanying an article published on Microsoft, an independent research firm focused exclusively on Microsoft strategy & technology. Enterprise search in SharePoint Server 2007 depends on two main components . An indexing service on a central server crawls enterprise data resources and builds full-text indexes to speed search. Query servers allow users to conduct searches. (In small-scale deployments, the indexing and query server can be combined on a single machine.) Out of the box, the SharePoint Server 2007 indexing service reads data from more than 200 types of sources, including SharePoint sites, HTML pages on other types of intranet sites, files on file servers, Exchange Public Folders, and Lotus Notes databases. The service can be extended to index more data types by installing additional iFilters, which are usually written by third-party ISVs or partners. A separate technology known as protocol handlers lets the indexing service retrieve dat...

I have a medium Moss farm 3 frontend servers Index server and DB server. I am at the part of adding the index server to the farm all is good but I am confused on the 2 check boxes "Use this server to index content" and "User the server for serving search queries" What is the difference? Do I check both if this is a dedicated Index Server? This is a very important distinction, and the decisions depend on your preferred architecture and performance. The index portion is definitely a requirement for making that your dedicated index server. This gives it the role of building and storing the index. The query role does not have to be on your index server. You can instead use your web front ends (1 or more) as query servers. What this does is it tells the index server to propagate its index to the WFEs that are set as query servers so that they have a local copy of the index. Then, when someone does a search (this is done on the WFE), then that WFE will search itself...

After setting up a new web application for a new portal I faced a crawling problem of the new site collection. Description: Right after starting the crawler it stops, giving 2-3 error messages, all with the same syntax: Error in the Site Data Web Service. (Value does not fall within the expected range.) The crawl log was the only place the error was logged, with no additional information regarding the cause of the problem. Searching the web came up with very little solutions, while only one of them seemed to apply to our case: 1. stsadm -o export -url http://intranet/sites/it -filename D:\it.back.11.21.08.cmp -versions 2 2. Delete the site collection 3. stsadm -o import -url http://intranet/sites/it -filename D:\it.back.11.21.08.cmp -updateversions 2 –nofilecompression (See here) While option 1 and 3 are reasonable, deleting the site collection didn’t apply since the portal was already in production stage. (along with the fact faze 1 didn’t pass either due to some technical issues…...

Although SharePoint offers multiple authentication options and authentication zones, the two most common choices for enterprise implementations in intranet scenarios are NTLM and Kerberos. Both of these protocols are used with Integrated Windows authentication in a classic challenge/response scheme. NTLM relies on IIS generating a token with a challenge, sending it to the client, the client responding with a token, and a domain controller validating that response. NTLM requires user names and passwords to be encrypted before they are transmitted, and also requires re-authentication (a new token) when accessing a new network resource. Kerberos, on the other hand, relies on a ticketing system where a client and server access a trusted authority called a Key Distribution Center (KDC), which responds to client requests and grants tickets that the client can use to access network resources. Kerberos does not require re-authentication for accessing multiple resources. Much of the documentati...

Query for the filename in the Leafname column of AllDocs table and the get the Id of that Row, then update the id in the following code and execute the same. File is in your hands!!! using System; using System.Configuration; using System.Data; using System.Linq; using System.Web; using System.Web.Security; using System.Web.UI; using System.Web.UI.HtmlControls; using System.Web.UI.WebControls; using System.Web.UI.WebControls.WebParts; using System.Xml.Linq; using System.Data.SqlClient; using System.Data.Sql; public partial class _Default : System.Web.UI.Page { protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e) { SqlBlob2File(); } public void SqlBlob2File() { try { int PictureCol = 0; // the column # of the BLOB field SqlConnection cn = new SqlConnection("server=vbassql01i\\bassql01in1;integrated security=yes;database=IE_30_06_2010"); SqlCommand cmd = new SqlCommand("SELECT [Content] FROM AllDocStreams ...

To Fix this problem Hotfix available : http://support.microsoft.com/kb/896861

We all know the power of SharePoint Designer. When there is any requirement in which we need to send a mail when item is added to list or document library along with its metadata column values and with some formatting. However I observed one simple limitation of designer workflow. We can add field values in the body part when we want to send an email from designer workflow. However when it comes to the subject line, we cannot add some static text and field value together. It can be wither entirely static subject line or it can be entirely a field values. So how should we overcome this difficulty? Well, the idea is have one calculated field and define its value with “static text” & [field value] and when sending mail from designer, mention this calculated field in subject line. You are ready to send a customized subject line.

We all know there is a way we can synchronize SharePoint calendar with outlook and then work from outlook or from SharePoint and changes get synchronized automatically. However, if you already have outlook calendar and want to sync the calendar with SharePoint calendar, then follow this approach. Following is the approach for outlook 2007. 1) Create one calendar in SharePoint site and connect it with outlook. 2) Open your source outlook calendar, click on that calendar. 3) Open view menu – >Current View-> All appointments. 4) Hit Ctrl+A button to select all appointments. 5) Simple drag all appointments to the respective destination calendar in outlook. (Destination calendar will be the one that we synchronized in step2) Just make sure that person who is synchronizing the calendar should have appropriate permission to write in the calendar.