SharePoint Skater

Earlier this week a client called.  Our beautiful MOSS installation had been running beautifully, and then several days after a reboot... their Search completely stopped working.

(apologies to Clive Lewis)

Have you ever needed to back up a VHD with a script?  If you have, then you've probably wanted to make sure it copied successfully.

Rebooting cures a multitude of ills.

Over the past two years I've come to realize that the SharePoint server equivalent is to run the SharePoint Products and Technologies Configuration Wizard (what a mouthful that is).  However, my latest discovery is that there is a client equivalent as well.

If a user complains of JavaScript errors (e.g. "Library not registered"), of Excel 2007 documents opening in Excel 2003, or a handful of other SharePoint-related client-side issues, I now point them directly to the MS Office Diagnostic Tool.  Here's the basic procedure:

1.      Open Word 2007 (or Excel 2007).
2.      Click the Office button.
3.      Click the Word Options (or Excel Options) button on the resulting menu.
4.      Select the Resources tab on the left.
5.      Click the Diagnose button.
6.      Start the diagnostic tests and follow the prompts.

The SharePoint Recycle Bin is a very useful feature, but due to the lack of a separate permission structure, sometimes product owners want to hide it from their users.  This can be done in a variety of ways, but I've found that the simplest is to create a new master page (usually from a downloaded copy of the one you currently use on your site) and find the following tag:

We still don't have good SharePoint debugging, but today I came across a tool that gets us closer.  Essentially it works off of the SP logging mechanism, and alerts you when messages come up that meet your predefined filters.  This has the advantage of (a) keeping you from having to go through the log files line by line, and (b) filtering at a higher level, allowing you to keep all that log information rather than excluding some events from being logged.

It's happened to everyone.  You're supposed to be an expert in your field, and then you go and get tripped up by something insignificant.  If you're like me, you think you've already eliminated the offending possibility, and it's only after the client (ack!) checks out your assumptions that you realize your foolish mistake (in this case, it was the assumption that the server's software firewall had nothing to do with the problem... but it did).

This has come up several times recently, and I think it's another case of the "Microsoft offers it so we should use it" mentality.  There are indeed tools and utilities for migrating your existing farm -- or content database(s), or site collection(s) from 2003 to 2007; there are even procedures for upgrading your SharePoint farm to the new version.