Imperfect IT

Azure Virtual Machine Time Sync

noreply@blogger.com (Imperfect IT) — Wed, 01 May 2013 08:59:53 PDT

We've built a few domains on Azure to host Active Directory, SharePoint, SQL, etc... After a while we started to notice that the time on the severs would get out of sync. It wasn't a big difference, but enough that we started to see issues with the applications. The source of the problem is load on the Hyper-V hosts that host the VM's. When load gets too high, it causes time issues.The easiest thing to do seems to be to set a time source on all the servers.

Here are the steps we used:

Open a command prompt on your domain controller. To see the current time difference: w32tm /stripchart /computer: time.windows.com /samples:5 /dataonly
Open UDP port 123 for outgoing traffic if needed.
Open UDP port 123 (or a different port you have selected) for incoming NTP traffic.
Type the following command to configure the PDC emulator and then press ENTER:
w32tm /config /manualpeerlist: time.windows.com /syncfromflags:manual /reliable:yes /update
The next steps have to be run on the computers in the domain.
Open a Command Prompt and type the following command and then press ENTER:

w32tm /config /syncfromflags: domhier /update
Type the following command and then press ENTER:

net stop w32time
Type the following command and then press ENTER:

net start w32time

Note: You may also use Group Policy to make all the domain clients to sync time with PDC emulator in the domain.

Windows Azure Infrastructure (IaaS) is Ready for Prime Time!

noreply@blogger.com (Imperfect IT) — Thu, 18 Apr 2013 10:31:51 PDT

We just got an alert from Microsoft that Azure virtual machines and networks are generally available. If you're like us you've been testing out the VM capabilities for a while, but it's now production. We just put the finishing touches on a domain and SharePoint server farm all built on Azure VM's. After stumbling through it for a couple of weeks, we now have the process down and can spin up entire environments in a matter of hours. We'll be producing a white paper shortly to show you how it's done.

Here's the announcement with a few interesting links:

Windows Azure Infrastructure Services, Virtual Machines and Virtual Network, now are generally available!

Today is a major milestone for Windows Azure and all of our customers and partners. We are excited to announce that Windows Azure Virtual Machines and Windows Azure Virtual Network now are generally available. These new services make it possible for you to move your applications into the cloud as is. We also want to update you on a new price commitment we’ve made.

This announcement is a significant step in our cloud computing strategy, which has been influenced directly by our discussions with customers and partners around the world. One point holds true in every one of our discussions with you - the cloud should be an enabler for innovation, and an extension of your organization’s IT fabric, not just a fancier way to describe cheap infrastructure and application hosting. This brief video explains what we mean by extension of your organization’s IT fabric.

You’ve also told us that you don’t want to have to choose either a low price or good performance; you want a low price and good performance. That’s why today we are also announcing a commitment to match Amazon Web Services prices for commodity services such as compute, storage and bandwidth. This starts with reducing our GA prices on Virtual Machines and Cloud Services by 21-33%.

You can find the general availability announcement and the price reduction details at Windows Azure Blog.

We have great guidance on scenarios in which you can take advantage of Windows Azure Infrastructure Services. Learn more at our Infrastructure Services page and get going with a free trial at www.windowsazure.com today.

SharePoint Conference 2012 Keynote is Now Online

noreply@blogger.com (Imperfect IT) — Sun, 17 Mar 2013 10:06:46 PDT

If you were unable to make it to Las Vegas for the annual Microsoft SharePoint Conference, you can watch the keynote right here and see what Microsoft is sharing about the future of SharePoint. Speakers include Jared Spataro, Jeff Teper, Scott Guthrie, and David Sacks.

Some highlights:

Drag and drop files from your desktop to SharePoint Online (Office 365) document libraries.
Deep integration with personal and corporate SkyDrive.
Conversations are attached to all sites by default.
Aggregation of SharePoint, Exchange, and Project tasks.
SharePoint 2013 Windows phone app for version 7 and 8
Yammer social capabilities will be integrated into SharePoint to improve communication both internal to your company, and externally with partners and customers. Over 200,000 companies use Yammer including 85% of Fortune 500.
Access SharePoint documents from Yammer.
Yammer will be free to SharePoint online customers.
Cloud, cloud, and more cloud. You can run your own servers, but they recommend cloud.
Search - personal re-find links will show when you search for things you've already looked at saving you from going to the search results page. Search results will give links to sections inside a document.
You can now create SharePoint content with virtually any designer tool (not limited to SharePoint Designer).
eDiscovery uses discovery sets and queries to make you a hero to legal. Works across multiple Microsoft Enterprise apps (ex. Exchange).
"Site mailboxes" show data like a document library in your Outlook .
40% better use of bandwidth.
4X image compression.
The new Cloud App Model Ecosystem allows developing SharePoint apps for on-premise or SharePoint Online.

SharePoint 2013 RTM Available

noreply@blogger.com (Imperfect IT) — Wed, 31 Oct 2012 12:22:53 PDT

Just noticed on MSDN that SharePoint Server 2013 is available for download. Office 2013 is there as well. If you don't have volume licensing, you can probably expect to get your hands on it in early December. For preview copies you and other developer tools, you can go here.

This is a little earlier than the November date we'd been hearing fo a while.

Enjoy!

SharePoint Server 2013 on MSDN

SharePoint Farm on Windows Azure

noreply@blogger.com (Imperfect IT) — Wed, 17 Apr 2013 12:07:17 PDT

***Update: Microsoft Azure Infrastructure is live (no longer demo) as of April 16th, 2013***

Microsoft recently announced that you can install SharePoint on virtual machines (IaaS) on Azure.

Why would you want to do this? The main motivator is the speed at which you can bring the environment up. If you don't have a robust Hyper-V or VMware environment in house, Azure gives you an easy way to spin up servers with no trips to the data center and no ordering/provisioning hardware. Unlike the Office 365 offering, you have complete control over your SharePoint farm and guaranteed uptime of 99.9%.

What type of SharePoint environment is a candidate for Azure?

SharePoint for Internet Sites - Move your external website to Azure and you don't need to deal with DMZ's and firewalls (or your networking co-workers).
Developer, Test and Staging - Bring them up and blow them away as needed. With Azure PowerShell this can all be scripted.
Hybrid Applications - You can setup a SharePoint environment that pulls or pushes data to applications in your local data center (on-premise).
Disaster Recovery - When your local environment takes a hard nap, bring it up in Azure and then blow it away when you get it restored.

To learn all about the offering, check out the following paper from Microsoft:

http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=34598

You can also find a great article detailing how to setup a basic Azure SharePoint farm with step-by-step instructions and screen shots over at PointBeyond.

You can also watch the following video from Channel 9 presented at TechEd.

SharePoint 2010 Event ID 7043

noreply@blogger.com (Imperfect IT) — Mon, 22 Oct 2012 09:10:25 PDT

We recently noticed the following error in the Application event log on our SharePoint 2010 servers:

A quick Google search turned up the following article on the SharePoint forum: http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en/sharepoint2010setup/thread/c894d98c-24ab-416c-aca9-ae57644deb5e

It turns out the issue is caused by bad code. Simply do a search for the file called TaxonomyPicker.ascx (C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\14\TEMPLATE\CONTROLTEMPLATES) and open it up in Notepad. Do a search for the characters “,” and replace it with a “,” (minus the quotation marks in both cases).

From this:

To this:

Thanks to Brian Lala, this can all be accomplished by creating and running the following script:

# Powershell script to implement the fix suggested in http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2481844

$TaxonomyPickerControl = "$env:CommonProgramFiles\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\14\TEMPLATE\CONTROLTEMPLATES\TaxonomyPicker.ascx"
Write-Host " - Making a backup copy of TaxonomyPicker.ascx..."
Copy-Item $TaxonomyPickerControl $TaxonomyPickerControl".bad"
$NewTaxonomyPickerControl = (Get-Content $TaxonomyPickerControl) -replace ',', ","
Write-Host " - Writing out new TaxonomyPicker.ascx..."
Set-Content -Path $TaxonomyPickerControl -Value $NewTaxonomyPickerControl
Write-Host " - Done! Press any key to exit..."
$null = $host.UI.RawUI.ReadKey("NoEcho,IncludeKeyDown")

Microsoft finally release a KB article on the issue which can be found here: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2481844

SharePoint 2013 - Everyting We Know!!!

noreply@blogger.com (Imperfect IT) — Wed, 31 Oct 2012 09:18:11 PDT

***Update October 31st - SharePoint 2013 and Office 2013 are now available for download****
http://imperfectit.blogspot.ca/2012/10/sharepoint-2013-rtm-available.html

Microsoft just released a pile of info on the next version of SharePoint. Check the link for everything you need to know: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc303422(v=office.15)

Download the SharePoint 2013 Server preview
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/evalcenter/hh973397.aspx?wt.mc_id=TEC_121_1_33

Office 2013 training site
http://officepreview.microsoft.com/en-us/support/training-FX101782702.aspx

Download SharePoint Designer 2013
http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=30346

Download SharePoint 2013 Foundation
http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=30345

Download SharePoint 2013 Client SDK
http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=30355

IT Pro training material
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/vesku/archive/2012/07/17/sharepoint-2013-it-pro-and-developer-training-materials-released.aspx

Download SharePoint 2013 IT PRO Training material
http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=30361

Office/SharePoint 2013 store
http://officepreview.microsoft.com/en-us/store/apps-for-sharepoint-FX102804987.aspx

MSDN for Office and SharePoint 2013
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-US/office/apps

Download SharePoint 2013 technical library compiled
http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=30382

Exchange 2010 Archiving Features

noreply@blogger.com (Imperfect IT) — Sun, 21 Oct 2012 11:26:26 PDT

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Why would you want to get rid of .pst files and move the data into Exchange server archive databases?

Unmanaged files Generally, .pst files are created by users and reside on their computers or network shares. They aren't managed by your organization. As a result, users can create several .pst files containing the same or different messages and store them in different locations, with no organizational control.
Increased discovery costs Lawsuits and some business or regulatory requirements sometimes result in discovery requests. Locating messaging data that resides in .pst files on users' computers can be a costly manual effort. Because tracking unmanaged .pst files can be difficult, .pst data may be undiscoverable in many cases. This could possibly expose your organization to legal and financial risks.
Inability to apply messaging retention policies Messaging retention policies can't be applied to messages located in .pst files. As a result, depending on business or applicable regulations, your organization may not be in compliance.
Risk of data theft Messaging data stored in .pst files is vulnerable to data theft. For example, .pst files are often stored in portable devices such as laptops, removable hard drives, and portable media such as USB drives, CDs, and DVDs.
Fragmented view of messaging data Users who store information in .pst files don't get a uniform view of their data. Messages stored in .pst files are generally available only on the computer where the .pst file resides. As a result, if users access their mailboxes using Outlook Web App or Outlook on another computer, the messages stored in their .pst files are inaccessible.
Dispersed Disk Usage Users create .pst files then put them in multiple locations causing laptops and desktops to run out of disk space. Often they make copies of them “to be safe”. This has a negative impact on backups.

Where can you put an archive mailbox?

You can provision a user's personal archive on the same mailbox database as the user's primary mailbox, another mailbox database on the same Mailbox server, or a mailbox database on another Mailbox server in the same Active Directory site. This provides flexibility to use tiered storage architecture and to store archive mailboxes on a different storage subsystem, such as near-line storage. In cross-premises Exchange 2010 deployments, you can also provision a cloud-based archive for mailboxes located on your on-premises Mailbox servers.

What are the client requirements to use archives?

Client	Access to archive mailbox
Outlook 2010, Outlook 2007, and Outlook Web App	Yes. Outlook 2010, Outlook 2007 and Outlook Web App users can copy or move items from their primary mailbox to their archive mailbox, and can also use retention policies to move items to the archive. Note: Outlook 2010 and Outlook 2007 users can also copy or move items from .pst files to their archive mailbox. Outlook 2007 users require the Office 2007 Cumulative Update for February 2011. Some differences in archive support exist between Outlook 2010 and Outlook 2007. For more information, see Exchange Team Blog article, see Yes Virginia, there is Exchange 2010 archive support in Outlook 2007.
Outlook 2003 and older clients	No.
Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync	No.

Note:

What do you need as far as licensing?

Personal archives are a premium feature and require an Exchange Enterprise client access license (CAL). For details about licensing Exchange, see Exchange Server Licensing. For details about the versions of Microsoft Outlook required to access an archive mailbox, see License requirements for Personal Archive and retention policies.

Is data from your archive added to the .ost file of Outlook users who are using caching?

Outlook doesn't create a local copy of the archive mailbox on a user's computer, even if it's configured to use Cached Exchange Mode. Users can access an archive mailbox in online mode only.

Do delegates of a mailbox get access to the associated archive data?

Yes

How can users move messages into the archive?

Move or copy messages manually Mailbox users can manually move or copy messages from their primary mailbox or a .pst file to their archive mailbox. The archive mailbox appears as another mailbox or .pst file in Outlook and Outlook Web App.
Move or copy messages using Inbox rules Mailbox users can create Inbox rules in Outlook or Outlook Web App to automatically move messages to a folder in their archive mailbox. To learn more, see Learn About Inbox Rules.
Move messages using retention policies You can use retention policies to automatically move messages to the archive. Users can also apply a personal tag to move messages to the archive. For details about archive and retention policies, see Archive and Retention Policies later in this topic.

Note:

Personal tags are available only in Outlook 2010 and Outlook Web App.

Import messages from .pst files In Exchange 2010 SP1, you can use a mailbox import request to import messages from a .pst file to a user's archive or primary mailbox. For details, see Understanding Mailbox Import and Export Requests. Tools used to locate .pst files within an organization are available from Microsoft partners. For a list of Microsoft partners for archiving, see "Archive and Compliance Partners" in Independent Software Vendors.

What are archive and retention policies?

You can apply archive policies to a mailbox to automatically move messages from a user's primary mailbox to the archive mailbox after a specified period. Archive policies are implemented by creating retention tags that use the Move to Archive retention action.

Messages are moved to a folder in the archive mailbox that has the same name as the source folder in the primary mailbox. If a folder with the same name doesn't exist in the archive mailbox, it is created when the Managed Folder Assistant moves a message. Re-creating the same folder hierarchy in the archive mailbox allows users to find messages easily.

Important:

You can't apply a managed folder mailbox policy to mailboxes that have a personal archive. Managed content settings created for managed folders can't use the Move to archive action. To learn more about managed folders, see Understanding Managed Folders.

Exchange Setup creates the default archive and retention policy Default Archive and Retention Policy. This policy contains retention tags that have the Move to Archive action, as shown in the following table.

Default archive and retention policy

Name	Type	Retention age (days)	Retention action
Default 2 years move to archive	DPT	730	Move to Archive
Personal 1 year move to archive	Personal tag	365	Move to Archive
Personal 5 year move to archive	Personal tag	1,825	Move to Archive
Personal never move to archive	Personal tag	Not applicable	Move to Archive
Recoverable Items 14 days move to archive	Recoverable Items folder	14	Move to Archive
1 Week Delete	Personal tag	7	Delete and Allow Recovery
1 Month Delete	Personal tag	30	Delete and Allow Recovery
6 Month Delete	Personal tag	180	Delete and Allow Recovery
1 Year Delete	Personal tag	365	Delete and Allow Recovery
5 Year Delete	Personal tag	1,825	Delete and Allow Recovery
Never Delete	Personal tag	Not applicable	Delete and Allow Recovery

If you enable a personal archive for a mailbox user and the mailbox doesn't already have a retention policy assigned, the default archive and retention policy is automatically assigned. After the Managed Folder Assistant processes the mailbox, these tags become available to the user, who can then tag folders or messages to be moved to the archive mailbox. By default, e-mail messages from the entire mailbox are moved after two years.

Archive policy in Outlook 2010 and Outlook Web App

Before provisioning archive mailboxes for your users, we recommend that you inform them about the archive policies that will be applied to their mailbox and provide subsequent training or documentation to meet their needs. This should include details about the following:

Functionality available within the archive, the default archive and retention policies.
Information about when messages may be moved automatically to the archive.
Information about the folder hierarchy created in the archive mailbox.
How to apply personal tags (displayed in the Archive policy menu in Outlook and Outlook Web App).

Note:

If you apply a retention policy to users who have an archive mailbox, the retention policy replaces the default archive and retention policy. You can create one or more retention tags with the Move to Archive action, and then link the tags to the retention policy. You can also add the default Move to Archive tags (which are created by Setup and linked to the Default Archive and Retention Policy) to any retention policies you create.

In Exchange 2010 SP1, the default archive and retention policy contains additional retention tags with the Delete and Allow Recovery action. To learn more, see Understanding Retention Tags and Retention Policies.

Is there a quota on the archive database mailboxes?

Yes, and it’s based on size. You can configure archive mailboxes with an archive warning quota and an archive quota. When an archive mailbox exceeds the specified archive warning quota, a warning event is logged in the Application event log. When an archive mailbox exceeds the specified archive quota, messages are no longer moved to the archive, a warning event is logged in the Application event log, and a quota message is sent to the mailbox user. By default, in Exchange 2010 SP1, the archive warning quota is set to 45 gigabytes (GB) and the archive quota is set to 50 GB.

Source: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd979795.aspx

SharePoint 2010 Event ID 6398

noreply@blogger.com (Imperfect IT) — Fri, 22 Jun 2012 14:34:21 PDT

Although it shows up as a Crital error which can be a little alarming, there's nothing to worry about here. It's simply the Microsoft Cutomer Experience Improvement Program trying to collect data and send it back to the mother ship. We go ahead and disable the feature at the farm level, and at the web application level.

To disable at the farm level, go to Central Admin - System Settings - Configure privacy options and select "No, I don't wish to participate" and "Ignore errors and don't collect information".

To disable at the web app level, go to Central Admin - Manage Web Applications. Highlight each web app and select General Settings, then scroll to the bottom and say No where it asks if you want to enable the CEIP.

Exchange 2010 Update Process

noreply@blogger.com (Imperfect IT) — Mon, 04 Jun 2012 12:54:33 PDT

From time to time, Microsoft release service packs and update rollups for Exchange. There are some things to keep in mind when it comes to applying these updates to your environment:

• Update rollup packages are cumulative. For example, if you apply Update Rollup 4 on a computer that is running Exchange 2010, you receive all the fixes in that specific update package together with all the fixes that were released in all earlier update rollup packages. That is, in Update Rollup 4, you receive all the updates that were released in the previous Update Rollup 1 through Update Rollup 3 packages plus the updates in Update Rollup 4.

• This approach to updating doesn't replace service packs for the product. Additional product fixes and features are released in separately available service packs for Exchange 2010.

• Microsoft releases update rollup packages approximately every six to eight weeks. The rollup packages are available via Microsoft Update and the Microsoft Download Center. In the Search box on the Microsoft Download Center, type "Exchange 2010 update rollup" to find links to the rollup packages.

• For Exchange 2010 configurations, the recommended order in which to apply the update rollup is as follows: Client Access server, Hub Transport server, Mailbox server, and Unified Messaging server.

To find out which version of Exchange 2010 you're running, logon to your server then go to Control Panel - Programs and Features. Highlight Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 and make a note of the Version.

Or run the following Exchange Management Shell command:

Get-ExchangeServer | fl name,edition,admindisplayversion

To see a list of Exchange versions, follow this link: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh135098.aspx

New eBook for Splitting an Oversized Sub Site into a New Site Collection & Database

noreply@blogger.com (Imperfect IT) — Sun, 27 May 2012 18:24:26 PDT

Most companies strive to implement solid governance plans and design their site structure accordingly, but reality often gets in the way. What was supposed to be a small site can have a sub site which grows unexpectedly. Next thing you know, your sub site alone has grown to over 100 GB. What do you do? If you don’t care that the URL of the sub site changes, then you can simply copy it to a new site collection with a new content database. This usually isn’t an option when people have links in documents and SharePoint sites that point to the original location. Moving it and trying to put forwarders or links to the new location is simply too painful. This detailed eBook will show you how to split that troublesome sub site off into a new site collection with its own content database using powershell and central administration while maintaining your URL structure. You'll get all the required steps with screen shots for the low price of $9.99 USD. If you're not satisfied, we'll gladly refund your money!

SharePoint 15 - What's Next?

noreply@blogger.com (Imperfect IT) — Fri, 20 Jul 2012 08:07:32 PDT

*** UPDATE - July 18th**** http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc303422(v=office.15. See also http://imperfectit.blogspot.ca/2012/07/sharepoint-2013.html

So you finally finished migrating all your SharePoint 2007 and WSS 3 sites to SharePoint 2010. Congratulations! The bad news (or good depending on how you look at it) is that the next version of SharePoint is right around the corner. Microsoft are very adept at keeping partners who've seen it quiet, but this is what's known so far. Keep in mind that all of this is based on leaks, and we won't know anything for sure until Microsoft announces it.

SharePoint 15 (as it's currently called) is scheduled to be Released to Manufacturing (RTM) November 12th. Only people who are involved in the Microsoft Technology Adoption Program (TAP) will have access to the bits before that. There are rumors the Beta will be realesed June 13th.

SP 15 will include an application marketplace similar to what you use with your mobile devices.
It will be better able to handle multi-tenant installations so hosters can get environments up and available faster and more securely. It will also make it easier to sell apps built on SharePoint to multiple companies.
It will be built to use an Oracle back-end (just kidding). Make sure you're running the latest version of SQL to speed your migration.
There are rumors there will be a an education module which allows schools to setup a virtual learning environment. Details here are murky.
More integration with Silverlight.
Built-in Information Rights Management.
Expansion of the cloud SharePoint offering (Office 365) and integration of on premise and cloud based SharePoint. It's clear Microsoft want to remove any objections companies have to moving their SharePoint environments into the cloud.
Better support and integration for mobile devices.
Simplified development tools. We would assume this means a new version of SharePoint Designer?
Tighter integration with the next version of Office (Office 15).
Expansion of the social networking capabilities. Weather this means a re-vamping of the existing My Sites or a complete overhaul is unclear. Maybe integration with Microsoft's partner Facebook?
Minimal Download Strategy (MDS allows websites to take much less bandwidth than with traditional technologies.)
Site versioning (an extension of the existing document versioning).

So, lots to look forward to, but also a lot to wrap your head around. We'll continue to update this post as more information becomes available. In the meantime, you can subscribe to this twitter feed: http://twitter.com/#!/NextSharePoint and visit the following sites:

http://www.cmswire.com/cms/web-development/sharepoint-15-arriving-early-2013-according-to-leaked-ms-roadmap-015162.php
http://www.cmswire.com/cms/information-management/sharepoint-15-complete-with-app-marketplace-coming-late-2012-014682.php
http://redmondmag.com/articles/2012/04/01/whats-next-for-sharepoint.aspx

Be sure to let us know if you've heard anything we haven't mentioned here.

New eBook for Automating SharePoint Backups with PowerShell

noreply@blogger.com (Imperfect IT) — Fri, 25 May 2012 13:24:34 PDT

We've had a lot of requests for more details on how to setup automated SharePoint backups with PowerShell, so we've gone ahead and created a detailed ebook which outlines the steps and permissions you need to get your backups up and running. In addition to screen shots, there are also copies of the scripts we use as well as an email notification section that will let you know if your backups failed. Simply click on the Buy Now button below and you can pay with your Paypal account or credit card. At only $9.99 USD, it's thousands cheaper than a 3rd party solution and will let you sleep a little sounder at night. If you're not satisfied, we'll gladly refund your money!

Windows PowerShell Command Builder for SharePoint 2010 Products and Office 365

noreply@blogger.com (Imperfect IT) — Mon, 30 Apr 2012 09:20:59 PDT

If you're like us, you're starting to figure out that you can do much more with SharePoint through PowerShell than you can through Central Admin. Microsoft recognize that not everyone is comfortable with PowerShell so they've created an excellent tool to help rookies create scripts they can use for everyday administration tasks.

Windows PowerShell Command Builder for SharePoint 2010 Products and Office 365 is a Silverlight® 4 application that is designed to help IT professionals and power users learn how to use Windows PowerShell for administrative tasks. The Windows PowerShell Command Builder enables IT professionals and power users to visually assemble commands related to SharePoint 2010 Products and Office 365 in the browser and take those commands to their respective products.

You can access the tool here: http://www.microsoft.com/resources/TechNet/en-us/Office/media/WindowsPowerShell/WindowsPowerShellCommandBuilder.html

And the getting started guide is here: http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=27588

Here's a screen shot to give you an idea of how the drag and drop interface looks:

If you're interested in learning more about administering SharePoint with PowerShell, have a look at the following:

http://dmitrysotnikov.wordpress.com/2010/04/14/sharepoint-2010-powershell-cheat-sheet/
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/ee518673
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee806878.aspx

Happy scripting!

List of SharePoint 2010 Site and List Templates

noreply@blogger.com (Imperfect IT) — Fri, 27 Apr 2012 10:28:17 PDT

The following is a handy list of all the available site templates followed by the list templates in SharePoint 2010:

Disable "Anyone outside my organization" in Outlook/Exchange 2010

noreply@blogger.com (Imperfect IT) — Thu, 26 Apr 2012 13:03:32 PDT

We had a requirement in our organization recently to disallow sending auto replies (formerly know as out-of-office messages) to recipients outside our organization who are not in our contacts. The basis for the request was to stop spammers from finding valid email addresses and to prevent SMTP loops. There are also concerns around privacy. You don't want people you don't know being aware you're out of town on vacation for the next two weeks!

To achieve this we run a script which changes the mailbox settings to disable the “Anyone outside my organization” in Outlook:

The following script was setup on our Exchange 2010 server to run as a scheduled task every hour (D:\scripts\lockextooftocontactsonly.ps1):

Get-Mailbox -database "DB01" | Get-MailboxAutoReplyConfiguration | where {($_.AutoReplyState -eq "Enabled") -AND ($_.ExternalAudience -eq "All")} | foreach {Set-MailboxAutoReplyConfiguration $_.Identity -ExternalAudience "Known"}

Note: You need to change DB01 to the name of your mailbox database.

The script does not disable the ability of a user to select the “Anyone outside my organization” option. It simply changes the option to “My Contacts only”. As a result the script needs to be run numerous times throughout the day to update the mailboxes with the proper setting.

SharePoint 2010 Event ID 6482

noreply@blogger.com (Imperfect IT) — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 09:49:39 PST

We recently started to get the following application event log error:

Because it was a test environment we went ahead and reset the search index and restrated the search application, but the errors kept coming back.

The fix was to reset the cache on alll four servers in the farm. Once we did that the errors disappeared. To see directions on resetting the cache, have a look at the directions below, or go to http://support.microsoft.com/kb/939308

***Note*** Complete these steps on any server running the SharePoint Timer Service in the farm.
1.Stop the Timer service. To do this, follow these steps:

•Click Start, point to Administrative Tools, and then click Services.

•Right-click Windows SharePoint Services Timer, and then click Stop.

•Close the Services console.

2.On the computer that is running Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 and on which the Central Administration site is hosted, click Start, click Run, type explorer, and then press ENTER.

3.In Windows Explorer, locate and then double-click the following folder:

Drive:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\Microsoft\SharePoint\Config\GUID

Notes

◦The Drive placeholder specifies the letter of the drive on which Windows is installed. By default, Windows is installed on drive C.

◦The GUID placeholder specifies the GUID folder.

◦The Application Data folder may be hidden. To view the hidden folder, follow these steps:

1.On the Tools menu, click Folder Options.

2.Click the View tab.

3.In the Advanced settings list, click Show hidden files and folders under Hidden files and folders, and then click OK.

◦In Windows Server 2008, the configuration cache is in the following location:

Drive:\ProgramData\Microsoft\SharePoint\Config\GUID

4.Back up the Cache.ini file.

5.Delete all the XML configuration files in the GUID folder. Do this so that you can verify that the GUID folder is replaced by new XML configuration files when the cache is rebuilt.

Note When you empty the configuration cache in the GUID folder, make sure that you do not delete the GUID folder and the Cache.ini file that is located in the GUID folder.

6.Double-click the Cache.ini file.

7.On the Edit menu, click Select All.

8.On the Edit menu, click Delete.

9.Type 1, and then click Save on the File menu.

10.On the File menu, click Exit.

11.Start the Timer service. To do this, follow these steps:

•Click Start, point to Administrative Tools, and then click Services.

•Right-click Windows SharePoint Services Timer, and then click Start.

•Close the Services console.

Note The file system cache is re-created after you perform this procedure. Make sure that you perform this procedure on all servers in the server farm.

12. Make sure that the Cache.ini file has been updated. For example it should no longer be 1 if the cache has been updated.

13.Click Start, point to Programs, point to Administrative Tools, and then click SharePoint 3.0 Central Administration.

14.Click the Operations tab, and then click Timer job status under Global Configuration.

15.In the list of timer jobs, verify that the status of the Config Refresh entry is Succeeded.

16.On the File menu, click Close.

Select the credentials you want to use to logon to this SharePoint site

noreply@blogger.com (Imperfect IT) — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 09:00:20 PST

Our users came across the following error when they were trying to login to their My Site (http://mysite/):

We had recently had to restore the My Site from a backup and it appears the restore process had changed the authentication type the extended website http://mysite/ was using from Kerberos to NTLM. We have another version of the site published as http://mysite.domain.com/ which was still set to Kerberos hence the authentication error.

The fix was to go into Central Admin - Manage Web Application (My Site) and then select Authentication Providers. I selected the offending Intranet zone and changed it back to Negotiate (Kerberos) so it matched the other Custom zone:

After an IISRESET, the error stopped appearing.

SharePoint 2010 User Profile Synchronization Error

noreply@blogger.com (Imperfect IT) — Tue, 18 Oct 2011 08:51:30 PDT

We recently started to notice the following "ma-extension-error" in ForeFront Identity Manager when we'd run a user profile synchronization with our Active Directory:

System.Reflection.TargetInvocationException: Exception has been thrown by the target of an invocation. ---> System.MissingMethodException: Method not found: 'Void Microsoft.Office.Server.UserProfiles.ProfileManagerBase.UpdateProfileWithBulkProperties(Int64, System.String, System.String, System.Collections.Hashtable)'.

at Microsoft.Office.Server.UserProfiles.ProfileImportExportService.UpdateWithProfileChangeData(Int64 importExportId, ProfileChangeData[] profileChangeData)

--- End of inner exception stack trace ---

at System.RuntimeMethodHandle._InvokeMethodFast(Object target, Object[] arguments, SignatureStruct& sig, MethodAttributes methodAttributes, RuntimeTypeHandle typeOwner)

at System.Reflection.RuntimeMethodInfo.Invoke(Object obj, BindingFlags invokeAttr, Binder binder, Object[] parameters, CultureInfo culture, Boolean skipVisibilityChecks)

at System.Reflection.RuntimeMethodInfo.Invoke(Object obj, BindingFlags invokeAttr, Binder binder, Object[] parameters, CultureInfo culture)

at Microsoft.Office.Server.WebServiceDirectProxy.WebMethodInfo.Invoke(Object webServiceInstance, Object[] args)

at Microsoft.Office.Server.WebServiceDirectProxy.Invoke(String methodName, Object[] args)

at Microsoft.Office.Server.UserProfiles.ManagementAgent.ProfileImportExportDirect.UpdateWithProfileChangeData(Int64 importExportId, ProfileChangeData[] profileChangeData)

at Microsoft.Office.Server.UserProfiles.ManagementAgent.ProfileImportExportExtension.Microsoft.MetadirectoryServices.IMAExtensibleCallExport.ExportEntry(ModificationType modificationType, String[] changedAttributes, CSEntry csentry)

After checking all the steps under the bible of User Profile configuration found here, we were fairly certain our configuration and accounts hadn't changed. It turns out the error was caused by a SharePoint 2010 security patch that had been applied to our servers as part of our regular patching process. Microsoft support confirmed this to be the case and even have an excellent post on it:

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/tehnoonr/archive/2011/09/19/september-security-bulletin-ms11-074-and-sharepoint-2010-issues.aspx

Basically we applied KB2560890 without applying several other patches. Simply apply the other patches (KB2494022, KB2560885, KB2566456, KB2566954, KB2566958, KB2566960) listed in the article above, and the error should go away.

A couple of notes:

After you apply the patches to all the servers in the farm, you need to run the SharePoint Configuration wizard on all the servers as well.
KB2566960 failed when we tried to install it because we don't use Office Web Apps in our farm.
You can Install SP1 and and the August CU to resolve this problem as well, but simply applying the patches is much less disruptive and less likely to cause new issues.
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/security/bulletin/ms11-074

Bad Blackberry Pictures from SPC2011

noreply@blogger.com (Imperfect IT) — Tue, 04 Oct 2011 15:13:39 PDT

SharePoint cheerleaders. It's about time!

Wall to wall vendors. Try not to make eye contact.

Keynote

Microsoft SharePoint Conference 2011, Anaheim, CA

noreply@blogger.com (Imperfect IT) — Tue, 04 Oct 2011 15:14:12 PDT

Keynote Quick Notes

Nerdy looking guys with both straps of their backpack on? Check. 80% of the room staring at their mobile device? Check. Well-dressed Euros taking pictures of everything? Check. We’ve got ourselves a tech conference!!!

Introduction

Jared Spataro - Sr. Director of SharePoint Product Management

• 7500 attendees

• Over 1 billion dollars in sales and growing in the double digits

• 125 million licenses sold (62 Million of SharePoint 2010 alone)

• 67% adoption among Microsoft enterprise customers

• Celebrity video: Luke Perry, Carmen Electra, Allan Thicke, Florence Henderson,

Speaker #1

Jeff Teper- Corporate Vice President, SharePoint Product Group

Theme is to get the most out of the conference and never hear yourself say “I didn’t know SharePoint can do that”

Redefine collaboration

Empower users by rolling out a self-service user experience
Self-service business intelligence. Pull data from your whole infrastructure and use and manipulate it in SharePoint.
Create a social fabric using things like the Outlook social connector
Build relationships and break down silos
Extend collaboration outside the firewall and include partners and customers
Showed video on how Spacex has built a strong collaboration infrastructure. They’re excited about the cloud and mobile aspects of SharePoint.

Unleash the Ecosystem

The developer community is growing exponentially
Will continue to push integration with Visual Studio
Want to further integrate with third party data. Not just read only, but manipulate and make better
Have numerous partners building solutions on the SharePoint platform. BCS to remote web services with Office 365 is coming.
There are new levels of SharePoint certifications coming to help identify those with the highest level of knowledge.

Build a world-class platform

MS are growing their SharePoint engineering team
Merge silos like websites, blogs, wikis, document management systems, record management systems into SharePoint.
Creating an architecture that supports hundreds of millions of documents and properly manage them.

Demo

Demoed a 15 server farm with 400 TB of storage. 1 contend database is 15 TB!
Has 7500 users connected and using a SharePoint environment
Navigates a document library with millions of documents with zero lag
Using FAST
High availability with SQL Denali. Allows you to replicate all db’s to another SQL server (not just content databases). Failed a 14.4 TB content database over in 10 seconds. The crowd goes wild!

Back to Jeff

The goal is to make their cloud solution this robust
50000 organizations moved to Office 365 when it first became available
They will continue to support enterprises that want to keep SharePoint internal

Music Video about customers and how they’re leveraging SharePoint (eBAY, the Hub, EA Sports, Scotia Bank)

Speaker #2

Kurt Delbene - President, Microsoft Office Division

More on the Cloud vision – Are you sensing a theme yet???

65% deploy social software tools
85% have a remote work force
4 million millenials enter the workforce every year

The Office division’s vision:

1. Continue to lead in productivity. A connected ecosystem .

2. Cloud on your terms

3. Unified platform – no more silos

Office 365

Where Office meets the cloud (Lync, Exchange , SharePoint, Office)
Tailored 365 to each tier of the enterprise.
Backed by Microsoft so it’s secure, reliable and well supported. Really hammering home the point they probably do it better than you can! I would not want to be calling India when SharePoint isn’t working properly, working my way through several layers of support to get the engineer that can help me.

Another video about an organization called NetHope who use Lync and SharePoint in the cloud to help numerous aid organizations work together. Demo with a guy from NetHope showing how they leverage Windows and SQL Azure combined with Office 365.

Big news!!! There will be another SharePoint conference next year at the Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas. Vegas is great and all, but that was the same city and venue as the last SharePoint conference. I'll just have to suck it up.

How to Delete a SharePoint Site and All of It's Sub Sites

noreply@blogger.com (Imperfect IT) — Fri, 23 Sep 2011 07:33:36 PDT

We were recently doing some maintenance cleaning up old sites when we noticed an annoying feature. When you try to delete a site that has numerous sub sites, SharePoint will continually kick out errors telling you it can't delete the current site because it has sub sites. This forces you to manually go through and delete the lower level sites, then work your way up.

I understand this is a "safety" feature to help make sure you don't delete any sub sites you didn't mean to, but I really want to get rid of this legacy site that's taking up a big chunk of SQL disk.

The solution? Run the following powershell command. Be sure you have a good backup in case you change your mind and substitute the site name (http://site/subsite) with the name of the sub site you want to nuke.

function RemoveSPWebRecursively(
[Microsoft.SharePoint.SPWeb] $web)
{
Write-Debug "Removing site ($($web.Url))..."

$subwebs = $web.GetSubwebsForCurrentUser()

foreach($subweb in $subwebs)
{
RemoveSPWebRecursively($subweb)
$subweb.Dispose()
}

$DebugPreference = "SilentlyContinue"
Remove-SPWeb $web -Confirm:$false
$DebugPreference = "Continue"
}

$DebugPreference = "SilentlyContinue"
$web = Get-SPWeb "http://site/subsite"
$DebugPreference = "Continue"

If ($web -ne $null)
{
RemoveSPWebRecursively $web
$web.Dispose()
}

Service Pack 1 for SharePoint 2010 Products is Now Available for Download

noreply@blogger.com (Imperfect IT) — Wed, 06 Jul 2011 14:39:27 PDT

Here's the info on where to get it and how to install directily from the SharePoint Team Blog

Download - http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/office/ee748587.aspx

Known Issues - http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2532126

Directions:

Install the service packs in the following order on every server in the farm.

1. Service Pack 1 for SharePoint Foundation 2010
2. Service Pack 1 for SharePoint Foundation 2010 Language Pack (if applicable)
3. Service Pack 1 for SharePoint Server 2010
4. Service Pack 1 for SharePoint Server 2010 Language Pack (if applicable)

The SharePoint 2010 Products Configuration Wizard or "psconfig –cmd upgrade –inplace b2b -wait” should be run once on every server in the farm following the final update installed.

The version of content databases will be 14.0.6029.1000 after successfully installation. For more in-depth guidance for the update process, we recommend reviewing the following articles. These articles provide a correct way to deploy updates and identify known issues (and resolutions).

It is strongly recommended to install the June 2011 Cumulative Update immediately after the installation of Service Pack 1. The June Cumulative Update includes several important security and bug fixes that are not included Service Pack 1.

SharePoint 2010 Service Pack 1 Will Be Available Shortly

noreply@blogger.com (Imperfect IT) — Mon, 30 May 2011 09:13:27 PDT

According to the SharePoint Team Blog Service Pack 1 for SharePoint 2010 will be available towards the end of June and it promises stability, perfomance and security enhancements the community has been asking for.

Here are the highlights of what we can expect:

Site Recycle Bin
Service Pack 1 will introduce long awaited Site Recycle Bin functionality that enables self-service recovery of site collections and sites. In the past IT Professionals were tasked with restoring entire databases to recover deleted site collections and sites and would generally require expensive restore environments to support the task. Now in Service Pack 1 administrators can quickly and easily recover site collections and sites accidentally deleted by their owners in a process similar to that of the Recycle Bin we have for Lists, Libraries, and Documents.

Shallow Copy
If you’re using Remote BLOB Storage you’ve probably realized that when moving Site Collections (Move-SPSite) between content databases each unit of unstructured data (BLOB) was round tripped (I.e. uploaded and subsequently downloaded again) serially during the move. This operation was both time consuming and resource intensive. In Service Pack 1 we reduce that overhead by enabling “shallow copy” when moving Site Collections between databases where Remote BLOB Storage is used. New Shallow Copy functionality with the Move-SPSite CmdLet enables moving site collections between content databases without moving the underlying unstructured data, i.e. Microsoft Word documents, PowerPoint Presentations, etc. significantly increasing performance and reliability for organizations using Remote BLOB Storage by simply updating the pointers to those objects in the destination content database.

StorMan.aspx
In SharePoint 2010 we removed StorMan.aspx (Storage Space Allocation) (see http://support.microsoft.com/kb/982587/EN-US) which in previous versions of SharePoint enabled granular management and insight into storage. For example, the page would show you the top 100 documents or document libraries in terms of size. With that information end users could the page to clean up content from their site(s) by deleting the large content that they no longer needed. In Service Pack 1 we are bringing back an improved StorMan.aspx, enabling users to better understand where their quota is going and act upon that information to reduce the size of their sites.

New enhancements will improve the way you interact with information in SharePoint 2010. Service Pack 1 adds support for working with SharePoint and the Office Web Applications using Internet Explorer 9 and the Google Chrome browser (for a complete list of supported browsers for SharePoint 2010 see also http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc263526.aspx), support for Open Document Format documents, and more.

There are also some unconfirmed reports of improvements to backup and restore, better Project/SharePoint integration and support for Google Chrome.

To read the official announcement click here and to be notified of updates sign up for the RSS feed here. Joel Oleson also has some information on his excellent SharePoint blog here.

Error - An unhandled exception occured in the Silverlight Application

noreply@blogger.com (Imperfect IT) — Tue, 03 May 2011 15:08:37 PDT

SharePoint 2010 users will come across this error eventually when they try to create a new site, list, library, etc.

Going by what the error said, we re-installed Silverlight on both the server and the client machine. No luck. After doing a Google search we learned that the error was caused by the Web Page Security Validation Web Application setting being set to Off.

To resolve the issue, follow the steps below:

Login to Central Admin
Select Application Management - Manage Web Applications.
Select the Web Application you were having the problem with, then select General Settings from the ribbon.
Scroll half way down the Web Application General Settings Window and turn security validation On.

That's it. Never has an error message given so little information to resolve the real problem!

Let us know if you have a similar issue.