Paul Grimley's Blog

Dave Coleman - A Personal Tribute

2014-10-29T17:44:00.002+00:00

Today I learned of sad news that a good friend of mine from the world of SharePoint has sadly passed away. Firstly and most importantly I'd like to pass on my thoughts and condolences to Dave's family.

I knew of Dave via Twitter and we started to share things in common in our work as we'd blog about similar types of things. Dave was a well-respected MVP who was regularly on webcasts and blogging he became someone I looked up to and respected for talking to someone who was unproven at the time in the community - I salute you for that Dave!

After a few months of exchanging messages on Twitter I finally got to meet the man that was Dave Coleman at a SharePoint Saturday however I really got to know Dave at a SharePoint Conference in Anaheim back in 2011. After every session we'd meet outside the front of the conference centre and Dave would always be at the same spot - later to be named 'Dave's Ashtray' on foursquare and his was proud to be the mayor! I further recall at one of the events held at Disney Land a group of us we're sitting having a beer when I looked round and Dave was choking to which I became very concerned. I asked 'Dave are you ok?' to which halfway through his choking fit he turned and said 'your funny you are!' and I didn’t realise I said anything funny but it tickled him.

Since the conference Dave and I had stayed in touch and in February of this year when I heard of his illness I popped in to see him (ironic that a man who didn’t like the seaside lived within two minutes of Bournemouth Pier), little did I know that this was going to be the last time. I recently sent him a message on Facebook asking how he was and he replied saying he was ok, however more recently I'd noticed that he wasn’t very active on social media channels and again sent him a message and no reply. I asked another friend if they knew anything and they told me he was in hospital and I was about to send Sue his wife a message to say hello and was thinking about you as I went to do this I saw my Facebook feed and sadly I was too late.

Dave, you were a true gent who I thoroughly enjoyed the company of. You have inspired me in my career and I can honestly say your inspiration has helped me be where I am today. Rest in peace Dave the world has lost a great man.

SUGUK - Nottingham SharePoint On-Premises vs. Cloud – Facilitated Discussion

2013-10-29T18:20:00.002+00:00

Thanks to everyone who attended last Thursday's (24th October 2013) session. Some great debate and myths discussed. A big thank you to those who travelled from far away to come along and participate in the session which makes it all worthwhile.

In brief, the feedback I received from the session was that if you client / company isn't ready to go cloud then make sure to focus on developing On-Premises solutions to work in Office 365 to avoid later needing to re-engineer.

A great article has just been published called
'Microsoft SharePoint 2013 Platform Options
What BDMs and architects need to know about Office 365, Windows Azure, and on-premises deployments' and this can be downloaded here: http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=40332.

A question was raised as to any details regarding Social and in particular Yammer. Another article regarding Social called: 'Social feature support for SharePoint Server 2013' can be found here: http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=39632 with additional information regarding Yammer and SharePoint here: http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/p/?LinkID=257047.

I hope the information above is useful and look forward to seeing you / presenting at future events.

Thanks again for supporting the SUGUK community!

SharePoint Saturday 2012 Slides

2012-12-21T13:03:00.000+00:00

I've finally got around to posting my slides from SharePoint Saturday 2012 discussing the considerations for upgrading to from SharePoint 2010 to 2013.

I have to say all the background effort and work is worth it when you see a full room and standing room only, so for those who attended - thank you.

For those who weren't able to attend to accompany these slides I posted a pre-event blog to give you so context to the slides.

It was great to see so many familiar faces and meet some of those who I'd only spoken to in the virtual world.

Some additional links discussed during the session which I promised to add:

Support statements for Virtualisation http://support.microsoft.com/kb/897615
SharePoint 2013 PLA (Product Line Architecture) Sorry no public link available (that I'm aware of)

2012 has been a great year!

2012-12-21T11:41:00.001+00:00

For me in 2012 I managed to achieve a major milestone in my career. I've had some great highlights for 2012; however, the main highlight for me was joining Microsoft, a lifelong ambition of mine. This doesn’t take away some of the other awesome things I have managed to do in 2012 including presenting at 3 large events, visiting Microsoft worldwide HQ (Redmond), worked with some great people / clients, continued to attend SharePoint user groups and most importantly stay in touch with some great people in the community.

Whilst the world is in turmoil I am truly grateful to be in the position I am and one thing I never do is take it for granted!

For 2013, I hope for more of the same! I expect with general availability of SharePoint 2013 next year will be more of the same for me in terms of business and I'm not complaining!

I wish you all a Happy Christmas and a prosperous 2013

Paul

Considerations for upgrading from SharePoint 2010 to 2013

2012-12-03T21:20:00.000+00:00

I'm pleased to again be invited to speak at SharePoint Saturday UK 2012, Nottingham 8th December 2012.

I want to set the scene to help you decide if my session is for you. Firstly, I wont be doing any demo's (sorry!) and secondly, I won't be doing a deep-dive into Technical features of SharePoint 2013 as there are plenty of other sessions throughout the day that will touch on these. What I will be doing is continuing the theme from previous presentations is the planning aspect around gearing up for SharePoint 2013 and things you should consider that you may not have thought about continuing my drive to help others deliver successful SharePoint platforms / stories. I will share some experiences my team have of working with early adopters of the technology.

So who should attend my session? Project managers, product managers, architects, IT Pro's and managers to name a few.

I hope to see you there and don't forget #SharePint afterwards.

Paul

Error installing SharePoint 2013 Preview on Windows Server 2012 Release Candidate

2012-07-24T16:08:00.001+01:00

Issue

Whilst attempting to install SharePoint 2013 onto a freshly installed (domain joined) Windows 2012 Data Center RC build I ran into errors installing the SharePoint 2013 prerequisites / binaries. From reviewing the output log whilst installing the prerequisites the error I suspected was interrupting the install was as shown below:

“error when enabling asp.net v4.0.30319”

Background

Hyper-V hosted on Windows 8 Release Preview
SharePoint 2013 Preview Build: 15.0.4128.1014
Windows Server 2012 RC Build: 8400
Forest / Domain functional level: Windows 2008 R2

I tried various things to attempt to resolve this including adding roles and features manually as well as attempting to register ASP.NET 4 using command:

%windir%\Microsoft.NET\Framework64\v4.0.30319\aspnet_regiis.exe -i –enable

The above proved unsuccessful and then came across this forum on TechNet http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/sharepointitpropreview/thread/94b98c03-842e-4b2e-8707-8652774d73a3/

Solution

The solution was to remove the Windows Server 2012 from the domain run the prerequisites and then install the preview followed by adding the server back to the domain.

I appreciate this isn't ideal however this resolved the problem for me and I will feed this back to the product group.

Presenting at Siemens PLM Conference – Document Management

2012-07-19T21:00:00.001+01:00

I recently attended and presented a session on SharePoint at the Siemens PLM (Product Lifecycle Management) Conference at the NEC, Birmingham on 17th July 2012. Microsoft were a gold sponsor at the event and I was lucky enough to meet some of the truly passionate individuals in manufacturing at the event who are looking at innovative ways of moving forward in these tough times. An industry close to my heart growing up the son of proud toolmaker passed down from generations running his own business for 30 years based in Birmingham I have a lot of appreciation for things people take for granted and the effort and precision that goes into manufacturing products.

Onto the session, I presented on what is SharePoint and how its currently used in Manufacturing. Siemens were launching their latest offering Solid Edge Insight XT which when used with SharePoint compliments the product and provides additional functionality.

The main areas I covered in the presentation included:

Document management / Collaboration

Versioning
Approval
Alerts
Workflow
Discussions / forums
Announcements
Project task lists
Search benefits
Templates to provide consistency for documentation

Benefits for Designers / Departments

Sharing information with customers / suppliers
Reduced overhead on IT department as you have control of your data
Office look and feel providing a familiar environment to carry out tasks
Office client integration

One message that I wanted to be taken away from the session is that there is a base version known as SharePoint Foundation 2010 that can be installed free and the majority of basic document management features I discussed within my session are available within SharePoint Foundation. This is not to suggest that this will provide all the needs for you requirements however a god way to map these is to compare versions http://sharepoint.microsoft.com/en-us/buy/Pages/Editions-Comparison.aspx.

Below are a copy of my slides from the presentation:

A few interesting conversations took place during the conference including:

How do I move from Oracle / SQL databases
SharePoint performance was slow how can i improve this – the context to this question was related to converting CAD files stored in SharePoint and a suggestion was to look at the RBS (Remote Blob Storage) capabilities http://technet.microsoft.com/library/ee748607.aspx
We are going to use SharePoint but we don't know where to start? Well this is too much of an open ended question to answer here but in short the answer is plan and bring in experts otherwise you may not have the best experience. See a previous blog post of mine here http://www.paulgrimley.com/2011/08/will-sharepoint-work-for-us.html.

There is also a case study for Street Crane Company Ltd just been published to Microsoft Case Studies gallery which I encourage you to check out if you are considering SharePoint for your organisation. This can be seen here http://www.microsoft.com/casestudies/Case_Study_Detail.aspx?casestudyid=710000001163.

Finally I’d like to thank David Chadwick from Siemens for the effort he’d put into the session, he showed real passion for using SharePoint (and all the benefits it has) with Solid Edge Insight / Insight XT.

We’re hiring–July 2012

2012-07-19T15:43:00.001+01:00

Its exciting times at Microsoft with Office 2013, SharePoint 2013, Windows 8, Surface… the list goes on of product releases taking place and as part of this we’re continuing to grow the consultancy practice to accommodate the increased demand experienced and we’re looking for great people to compliment the excellent team’s we already have here.

Closer to home in my team Business Productivity - MCS UK we are looking for (more) SharePoint experts to join the team.

If other than the opportunity to work for Microsoft you need a reason to come and join, here’s a few things I have certainly found to be of benefit:

Opportunity to work with some truly inspiring people
Access to all Microsoft’s training material
Working on Enterprise accounts
Excellent development prospects and supporting management to help achieve your ambitions
Fantastic benefits package
Great work / life balance
Large discounts on Microsoft products

So if you’re interested contact me on LinkedIn and I'll happily have a conversation with you. Please note you must have extensive experience of both working with the SharePoint platform and client facing consulting to apply so please consider this before getting in touch.

I’m still here!

2012-07-19T14:29:00.001+01:00

Its been a while since I've blogged and as much as I’ve wanted to unfortunately I’ve had other commitments. As you may have seen from my last post I recently joined Microsoft and as part of joining I have been undertaking a lot of internal studying whilst also working on client engagement. This is not only technical study but also learning the Microsoft culture and consume lots of information about how the business work, the different types of roles, financials, scorecards not to miss a whole wave of new products being released as we speak, so exciting times indeed.Its been a great journey to date with Microsoft and long may it continue.

I hope to blog more frequently from now as I can begin to share more information on Office / SharePoint 2013/ Windows 8 and look forward to seeing new and old faces along the journey.

Paul

Supporting SharePoint Internally Slides - International SharePoint Conference 2012

2012-04-25T12:07:00.001+01:00

Thanks again to all the attendees to my session and here are the slides.

My session at The International SharePoint Conference 2012

2012-04-16T19:27:00.001+01:00

With the past 2 years delivering a greenfield SharePoint 2010 platform to a global law firm my session focuses on the aspect of SharePoint often overlooked – maintaining it after its implemented.

For those who have attended my previous sessions I continue the theme of sharing real-world experiences. My session aims to provide you with some key takeaways and considerations for any organisation looking at delivering solutions based on the SharePoint platform.

More information on my session can be found on the International SharePoint Conference 2012 agenda found here http://www.internationalsharepointconference.com/Pages/Sessions.aspx#CS712.

If you do attend my session and use twitter please use the hashtag #CS712 and I’ll happily pick up with you any discussion points further after or just come and see me at the end or throughout the event.

Finally, if you haven't got yourself a ticket to attend the event I highly recommend you do, meeting and sharing experience with industry experts is invaluable and a great opportunity to ask those questions you haven't been able to find answers to previously. The organiser Combined knowledge host a great event and I’m certainly look forward to yet again being a part of it.

I look forward to meeting new and seeing old friends!

See you there.

Paul

All good things come to an end…

2012-03-23T10:23:00.001+00:00

I am pleased to announce a life long ambition of mine has come true and I’m shortly due to join Microsoft, UK.

After my second spell working at Trinity Expert Systems I leave with great memories working with some fantastic people and a company with no doubt a great future ahead. Not only have I worked with some great people within Trinity I have met some great clients who have made the last 4 years fly. If my time at Microsoft is as good as it has been at Trinity I am sure to enjoy the next few years ahead.

I’m looking forward to the challenge ahead and thank all those who I have worked with who have helped me get to where I am today.

User Profile Sync DB growing out of control

2012-03-20T20:32:00.001+00:00

*** UPDATE 20/04/12 ***

February 2012 SharePoint 2010 cumulative update now includes several stored procedures:

“This hotfix package provides store procedures that clean up the Forefront Identity Manager (FIM) history tables during profile synchronization jobs.”

So the only reason you should be carrying out the steps in my post below is if you really need to (and I mean SQL is bursting at the seams) and applying February 2010 CU is some time away as this needs to be tested in non-production environments before releasing.

Information on the February 2012 CU can be found here http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2597150 also make sure you also review and download the SharePoint Foundation February 2012 CU http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2597132.

*** END OF UPDATE ***

Before I dive into this blog a quick question for you SharePoint people – Do you know the current size of all your production databases? and I don’t just mean content databases. Read on…

I recently noticed that just under a year after go-live a production SharePoint 2010 farm user profile sync database had expanded to 12GB. The sync database is for staging imports into the profile database as well as storing configuration information (more information here http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee662538.aspx). Therefore its not where the profile information lives long term as its a ‘staging’ database before committing to the profile store.

The impact of this database spiralling out of control was that SQL backups were unnecessarily taking longer as was SharePoint backups thus requiring more space to store and when considering if you retain weeks / months of backups this could have a large impact.

A colleague of mine Paul Hunt pointed me in the direction of this blog post which basically advises that after raising a call with Microsoft this database will continue to grow and there is no timer job (automation) to clear this out. Personally from the blog referred to I’m always nervous of running SQL scripts against databases due to potential issues with Microsoft support.

Reading http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff681014.aspx#resetSync this basically states:

“you can safely reset a User Profile Synchronization database without losing information in the profile store”

So proceeding with the steps (and testing in Pre Production) to reset the sync database, this did the trick and reduced the database to under 100MB from 12GB which meant happy storage and SQL database teams!

A couple of things to note is that you need to make sure you reset SQL permissions on the Sync DB and also make a note of all the synchronisation connections as the PowerShell script above will remove all connections and subsequent filters which aren't clearly identified from the landing page of the synchronisation configuration.

Finally this isn't a long term fix and as suggested in the blog post earlier a longer term resolution needs to be sought.

As always I welcome your thoughts.

Targeting SharePoint search scopes to different audiences – Part 3

2012-01-06T19:53:00.001+00:00

Part 3 – Adding tabs to Search Center

Following on from Part 2 this post in the series describes how to create the tabs and secure them to only be seen by certain users (In my case ‘sales’).

To create a tab there is quite a simple process and to do this all you need to do is edit a couple of lists stored in the search center called 'Tabs in Search Pages’ and ‘Tabs in Search Results’

Select the first list above and add a new item to the list.

Tabs in Search Pages

At this stage you need to remember the name of the page you created in Part 2 as you will need to enter this in the next screen.

Once you’ve entered the information correctly click save.

This is the crucial bit where we set the security on tab to targeted users. On the list where the item ‘Pauls blog’ appears select this item and from the ribbon click item permissions.

Remove permissions to all users and add the sales AD group.

Follow the same steps as Tabs for Search Pages above for Tabs for Search Results list.

Once you have followed the steps above you should now have a newly created targeted tab within your enterprise search center as shown below.

Tabs in Search Page

Tabs in Results Page

Real world examples

To put some real world on this the sort of scenarios this could apply to may be rolling out people finder (My Sites) to certain departments or searching of legacy systems to specific users.

It’s also worth noting that this is series of posts focuses on non SharePoint (anonymous) related content where security trimming results do not apply. If security m ay be an issue this needs to be considered as part of the design.

Conclusion

This scope is not necessarily 100% secure as you could drop a search web part into a site and narrow it down this way but to do this you would need site collection admin rights so the risk is minimal.

This blog does not focus on additional security trimming of content and without testing and design you may be providing users to unauthorised results so the advice here is use an account to access other systems with minimal rights. If you do need an elevated results pane why not create 2 scopes / results pages and use different crawl accounts providing access only to authorised users to the elevated results.

I hope this has been of use to you.

Targeting SharePoint search scopes to different audiences – Part 2

2012-01-05T21:11:00.001+00:00

Part 2 – Creating Results Page

Continuing on from Part 1, Part 2 of the series focuses on creating the results page for use with the targeted audiences.

Within the enterprise search center create a new page from site actions on the ribbon and give it a name.

You’ll then be presented with a new results page which if your not used to may look a little daunting. From this page what we need to do is tailor the results web part to only display results for the newly created scope.

Locate the web part search core results shown below and select edit web part from the drop down.

On the right hand side you need to enter the scope exactly as you did for part 1, as this is a manual entry this can easily be entered incorrectly so pay special attention to this.

Click ok at the bottom of the properties noting that if the content source has completed results may not be displayed until the page is saved and reloaded PLEASE DONT SAVE THE PAGE YET THOUGH!

The next step I describe I didn't originally do and this caught me out as the tab I describe in a later part to the series kept reverting back to the default results page and the tab would highlight the wrong scope so a new search would search the wrong source!

Locate the web part search box and edit the web part properties. From here expand the section miscellaneous. Modify the search results page to be the name of the page you are in the middle of creating, this basically means that once a search is committed on this page the scope will remain on the same scope. In this case the scope is Pauls blog.

So at this stage the page is configured with the correct parameters however we're not quite finished yet, although at this stage you can now go ahead and save / publish the page. To secure who can see the page we need to edit permissions. Let’s assume we are going to show this to sales but restrict access to marketing. All we need to do is edit the permissions on the page as you would do with any other item in SharePoint you wish to secure.

So in my case I’m going to give all users part of the sales AD group access to the page. Navigate to the pages library via site settings -> view all site content –> pages. Select the newly created page and from the drop down select manage permissions.

From manage permissions select stop inheriting permissions.

Remove all the users you do not wish to view this results page / scope and add the sales AD group as readers. This now only allows sales users to be able to see the page.

Part 3 will discuss creating the tab that appear in the search center and aligning this to the newly created page described here.

Targeting SharePoint search scopes to different audiences – Part 1

2012-01-05T16:19:00.001+00:00

Part 1 – Creating a Content Source and Scope

This blog post series details how to target search tabs in SharePoint enterprise search to specific groups of people. I have provided a guide as to how to set this up from start to finish.

The search tabs in SharePoint relate to pages where scopes can be defined for narrowing down results as shown below.

Firstly you need to create a content source for the scope to use of the site you wish to crawl / index. In my case this was a non SharePoint website. So for the purposes of the demo I’ll create a content source called ‘Pauls Blog’ and crawl http://www.paulgrimley.com.

Once the content source is created run a full crawl and make sure that you successfully crawl by checking the crawl log.

Whilst the content source is crawling next thing to do is create a scope that contains the content source (make sure you compile the scope from search administration).

From the search navigation on the left hand select scopes under ‘Queries and Results’. From here click ‘New Scope’.

We’ll come back to the search results page later as this will need configuring. On the next page one thing that can trip you up assuming that you’ve created you’re scope and its ready. Before its ready to be used the scope needs two things – rules and compiling once the rules are in place. Firstly select ‘Add Rules’ which is where I will assign the content source created earlier to the scope.

On the next page simply select the content source option and pick Pauls Blog from the drop down and click ok.

Notice on the next page it will state the scope is not ready until the next scheduled compile which in this case is 8 minutes.

To speed up this process you can force an immediate update of the job by compiling scopes from the search administration home page. Simply select Start update now and this should compile your scope within a small space of time.

So now the scope should be available for use within the enterprise search site collection. In Part 2 I will discuss creating a separate results page that can be secured and targeted at specific individuals.

Deploying SharePoint Globally – Slides from SharePoint Saturday

2011-11-12T14:21:00.001+00:00

Please see below my slides from SharePoint Saturday 12/11/2011.

Thanks for all those who attended, it was a great session.

Are we over complicating SharePoint quotes – maybe!

2011-09-28T22:20:00.001+01:00

This blog post is written on the back of lots and lots of quoting recently and the slant on this blog post is one of a consultancy firm providing clients with a quotation on the back of a requirement or set of requirements.

The requirement(s) could be something very simple or very complex but nonetheless its still a problem that needs a solution.

So I’ll pick something that should be familiar to those who work with or are familiar with SharePoint and work around explaining the title of my post in relation to this example. So we have been requested to create a web part for SharePoint. Lets just say for example the web part has a free text field where when a value is entered it looks up employee ID. This information is stored in a SQL database.

So with the above classed as a requirement there are one of 2 ways you could approach this:

1.Make lots of assumptions which the client may not understand and potentially not deliver within the timescales provided

2. Gather further information regarding the initial requirement to gain a more accurate understanding thus more closely meeting client expectations

Before discussing these options there are also additional considerations when quoting that the client may not have considered or budgeted for when the client receives the quotation. These things include (to name a few):

Testing
Project management
Documentation

Referring back to my two options, choosing option 1 may get you near the end result you were looking for (if you’re lucky) but on the other hand you could have wasted a lot of time and money and only be a little further forward but wiser nonetheless.

Option 2 will give you a clear idea of what can be achieved and the timescales to do so and in the process if you’ve structured the consultancy engagement in such a way of fixing the delivery agreeing scope beforehand the risk is offloaded onto the external consultancy firm. Yes I appreciate that gathering requirements in more detail will cost you a little time and the outcome maybe that what you actually expected to be delivered needs adjusting to what you can actually afford, wouldn't you want to find out beforehand?

As a bit of advice before going into an engagement make sure you have thought through what you actually want in detail thinking about not only what the requirements are but also what you would to happen on the screen or outputs to be in every eventuality you can think of (functional requirements). As an example for my specific scenario consider how you would want the web part to behave when the SQL database storing employee ID’s is unavailable – what should be displayed when the user enters a query? If you don't assumptions will be made for you and you could end up with a different output to what you expected.

The conclusion here is that the more information you can provide and the more understanding (where possible and appreciate this isn't always possible) of the problem this may narrow down the time required to deliver the solution, after all in the current climate we all want to be careful with how spend budgets. As regards the tax that go on top of delivering the functionality (project management, testing etc.) as consultants we do this everyday so we know what's involved, cutting corners on this just means you are going against the experts who you have asked for advice from and in the process adding lots of risk to delivering a successful outcome.

Shrinking SQL 2008 Databases for SharePoint

2011-08-05T12:34:00.001+01:00

So I have to confess I take no credit for this post and there are plenty of blogs out there that explain how to shrink SQL DB’s however searching for Shrinking SQL databases for SharePoint shows little matches so I thought I’d make easier for SharePoint folk to be able to find this quick an easy reference as normally you’d be looking for this solution when you’re environments fell over and need a quick fix.

Before proceeding I just want to warn you that this should not be carried out on production environments without consulting your SQL DBA team. This blog entry for those who are in trouble and need a quick fix for development environments where backups and DR are not necessarily crucial so transaction logs do not need to be considered to restore to a point in time. It’s also worth mentioning that any SQL maintenance that you carry out should be done so in accordance with the guidelines outlined in the KB link http://support.microsoft.com/kb/841057/en-us.

So to the command. From SQL management studio run the command as shown below changing the database name to the one you need to shrink, in the example below as you can see mine is DEV_ConfigDB.

USE DEV_ConfigDB

ALTER DATABASE DEV_ConfigDB SET RECOVERY SIMPLE

DBCC SHRINKFILE(DEV_ConfigDB_log, 1)

You should now find your log file has shrunk as well as the size of the actual database.

Finally its also worth mentioning that SQL Database Maintenance for SharePoint 2010 whitepaper. This is an in-depth paper written / contributed by members of the SharePoint product team that should satisfy a SQL DBA’s questions on how to run maintenance plans for SharePoint SQL databases.

I hope this is of some use to you.

Will SharePoint work for us?

2011-08-04T13:50:00.001+01:00

Of late I’ve been out and about visiting new clients who are either looking at SharePoint for the business or have installed SharePoint and don’t know what to do next. I recall a well known saying in the SharePoint community that was once said to me:

“The answers SharePoint, what's the question?”

This is sums up a lot of my engagement’s I’ve been involved in recently and there is a valid reason for it in as much that SharePoint is part of a lot of clients Microsoft Enterprise Agreement (an EA) so its been paid for so the view is lets use it. This is a like walking into a forecourt full of cars with a blindfold on and randomly pointing at a car that you want to buy only to realise its only got 2 seats when you needed 4 or its a manual gearbox and you can only drive automatics. I think you kind of get the picture of what I’m trying to say here is that if you go in blind you can’t expect to get the results you were looking for.

This is where the problem comes in because SharePoint as a product is a complex platform and understandably clients who have had little exposure to to date struggle to understand how to use it effectively and how to sell it.

SharePoint isn't another Exchange deployment where once its configured it just sends mail (and very well it does too), not to devalue the importance to Exchange implementations but if you’re implementing Exchange you’re requirement is pretty clear right? Email? That's not to say SharePoint doesn't need the same support from IT but its involvement from the business which will make it a success.

So with little knowledge of SharePoint's capabilities its wrongly being pitched as a solution when no evaluation has been carried out on the product to see if it meets specific requirements. SharePoint unfortunately comes in for some unnecessary criticism because its only after SharePoint has been decided as the solution they find out it only meet 60 – 80% of the requirements and at this point time, money and resource has been invested meaning the client either begrudgingly carries on with SharePoint having to request additional budget or bail out.

I also see that SharePoint is still being pitched as a point solution e.g. its an intranet and that's all and not a strategic platform with direction, which brings me onto my next point.

My advice at this stage is you need a strategy, a plan, a vision of where you are going and think bigger picture. Thinking short term will more than likely end in failure as you make the wrong choices it becomes harder and harder to unpick.

So some takeaways from reading this and advice I can give is to not expect internal staff to all of sudden become SharePoint experts, it takes time. In the short-term if things need to be done quickly look at external consultancy options or recruit experienced proven SharePoint people (this takes time I know!). Longer term look at internal staff strengths and identify who’s good at such things as development, leading, administration (especially those keen to learn new things), analysis, project management and then align these skills to how they fit with the roles that are needed to maintain and grow a successful SharePoint implementation.

So the key is what's the strategy? Then once there is a strategy defined evaluate the products capabilities and review where it meets the requirements and where it doesn't. If it doesn't do something well in one area look at the strategy of the business and review other areas and see if it has strengths there and look at its overall performance and make an overall decision.

To conclude with those I have engaged with over the last few weeks / months / years I am in no way criticising their approach, its tough to get it right and that's why investing in planning upfront is the best place to start to avoid wasted money, time and effort whilst expectation has not been met.

As always I welcome your views…

User Profile Information not correct in Site Collection My Settings (userdisp.aspx page)

2011-08-01T23:21:00.001+01:00

I came across a strange one the other day. A client called me to say when a user adds an alert it shows an email address that the user had a while ago and does not reflect an update in Exchange / AD. So the easy target was the user profile service however it proved not to be this (for once!).

So doing some digging I found some really strange behaviour. I tested the user in questions alerts and sure enough it was showing the old email address even though all the information for that user was definitely correct.

After further testing I experienced different profile information in different site collections (some correct and up to date and the others not).

So to picture the page I am referring to, here’s a screenshot below (_layouts/userdisp.aspx)

This is the page you would normally see in WSS or SharePoint Foundation and you can still access this page from SharePoint Standard or Enterprise selecting My Settings from the drop down.

Back to the issue.in hand so noticing different behaviour between site collections, I came across a Microsoft KB article KB2012619 which suggested that if a user is only a reader of the site collection they wont be able to update the information. I thought this was strange however I tested this and strangely it worked. Long story short I then tested again and it didn't so results were mixed. I then discovered the actual timer job which updates each site collection with the user profile information from the service application which is called ‘User Profile Service Application - User Profile to SharePoint Full Synchronization’:

This Timer Job was running fine however the specific site collections were not updating.

From articles relating to MOSS 2007 there was suggestions that if the database was not correctly attached to the farm the SSP would report issues. As the farm I was working on was upgraded I had suspicions that maybe not all was well with content database so decided to create a new content database and migrate all the site collections into this database using PowerShell to do so (See http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc825328.aspx#Section3).

After moving the site collections to the new content database then re-running the ‘User Profile Service Application - User Profile to SharePoint Full Synchronization’ Timer Job this successfully updated all site collections with the correct information. I tested this further by adding additional profile information in AD then running a full profile synch and finally the Timer Job to update the SharePoint Sites and the new information successfully propagated to each site collection.

So to conclude the user who’s alert page was showing an old email address was now corrected so his was able to receive alerts.

The dangers of going live without thorough investment in testing

2011-06-27T14:29:00.001+01:00

This post is a little more generic than my normal product focus on SharePoint technologies, reason being it applies to all IT solutions projects delivering a solution.

As you may have read in the news over the last couple of weeks a couple of high profile problems hit the headlines. These were the failure of Tesco’s banking platform migration (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-13888891) and The Olympics ticketing system for London 2012 (http://www.guardian.co.uk/sport/2011/jun/24/olympic-tickets-sale-second-round).

Both scenarios indicate that sufficient testing of their respective systems was clearly not carried out to avoid these unfortunate outcomes. With the advancement in virtualisation technologies there should be no reason why replicated scenarios can’t be simulated to forecast and avoid this happening.

One of the main reasons why testing is reduced is due to the financial overhead of such intense testing. This includes provisioning hardware, additional software licenses, resources to commission the system, testing the systems and the list goes on and effectively this is a project in itself.

What the system glitches didn't highlight and especially in the case the Olympics' ticket application system was that they simply didn't cater for the volume of applicants. This begs the question, why didn't they? Surely they were expecting this many applicants to apply?

This brings me on to the next point which is systems should be tested for every eventuality ‘What if’ and the outcome / behaviour of such a scenario.

Personally for the Olympic application (of which first time round I was unsuccessful) I was frustrated by how the results were displayed when searching for an event to attend. The results displayed all events even if they had been sold! All this did was make it harder for me to find events with availability and in the end I gave up. What I believe should have happened was as an event was sold out it was removed from the results to allow for easy navigation of availability. This was a case of the ‘what if’ scenario and how easy it should be for potential applicants to apply for tickets especially as second time round it was first come first serve so people would have been panicking trying to find availability as it rapidly disappeared.

So when discussing the financial cost of testing migrations / go-live scenario’s were the relevant risks pointed out of not thoroughly testing? Was the risk absorbed and understood?

IT may have been the one’s who were having the finger pointed at them however if they have highlighted the risks and issues of not thoroughly testing then is it IT’s fault? I certainly don’t think so and it easy to blame IT for this.

User Profile Synchronization Service failed to start due to Kerberos issue

2011-06-24T10:29:00.001+01:00

If you’ve reached this page and its the first one you’ve read about setting up the SharePoint user profile synchronization service I would highly recommend making sure you have read in detail this article http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee721049.aspx.

If you have read this and are still having issues read on..

So the issue I was having was that after upgrading a MOSS 2007 server to SharePoint 2010 (in place) the User Profile Synchronization service would attempt to start then after 5 minutes or so return to ‘stopped’. At this point I want to make clear that no part of my farm is setup for Kerberos authentication.

Looking into the server logs I found the following logs that looked suspicious:

Security ID:                DOMAIN\farmaccount
Account Name:                farmaccount
Account Domain:                DOMAIN
Logon ID:                0x58732
Logon Type:                        3
Account For Which Logon Failed:
Security ID:                NULL SID
Account Name:
Account Domain:
Failure Information:
Failure Reason:                An Error occured during Logon.
Status:                        0xc000005e
Sub Status:                0x0
Process Information:
Caller Process ID:        0xed8
Caller Process Name:        C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\14\BIN\OWSTIMER.EXE
Network Information:
Workstation Name:        SHAREPOINTSERVER
Source Network Address:        -
Source Port:                -
Detailed Authentication Information:
Logon Process:                C
Authentication Package:        Kerberos
Transited Services:        -
Package Name (NTLM only):        -
Key Length:                0
I also found an entry in the SharePoint Logs:

06/23/2011 10:43:23.73 OWSTIMER.EXE (0x1E2C) 0x1FE8 SharePoint Portal Server User Profiles 9q15 High UserProfileApplication.SynchronizeMIIS: Failed to configure ILM, will attempt during next rerun. Exception: System.Security.SecurityException: There are currently no logon servers available to service the logon request. at System.Security.Principal.WindowsIdentity.KerbS4ULogon(String upn) at System.Security.Principal.WindowsIdentity..ctor(String sUserPrincipalName, String type) at System.Security.Principal.WindowsIdentity..ctor(String sUserPrincipalName) at Microsoft.IdentityManagement.SetupUtils.IlmWSSetup.GetDomainAccountSIDHexString(String domainName, String accountName) at Microsoft.IdentityManagement.SetupUtils.IlmWSSetup.GrantSQLRightsToServiceAccount() at Microsoft.IdentityManagement.SetupUtils.IlmWSSetup.IlmBuildDatabase() at Microsoft.Office.Server.Us...

From researching this I managed to find this blog which suggested the issue is related to Kerberos.

Now this seems strange as my farm is not running Kerberos and nor are the Web Applications so I could have quite easily discarded the blog however stranger things have happened so I followed the blog mentioned and added a Kerberos SPN for the farm account to AD.

Sure enough this fixed the issue and the User Profile Synchronisation Service started and has since worked perfectly.

One thing that to note is that if you remove the SPN after starting the service and it for some reason returns to the stopped state you will need to re-enter the SPN to start the service.

Credit to my colleague James Brennan for assisting in resolving this issue.

SharePoint databases report ‘Database is in compatibility range and upgrade is recommended’ after upgrade

2011-06-23T17:07:00.001+01:00

Following on from previous blog and day 2 of upgrade found some of the databases were reporting the following error:

Database is in compatibility range and upgrade is recommended

This was appearing on non content databases (as in SharePoint system databases).

This seemed strange as I mentioned in my previous blog that the upgrade had been successful so was a little perplexed to find this issue.

After a little research there didn't seem to be anything that looked to answer my problem.

Although this blog was referring to Windows 7 it was interesting in helping my trail of thought and also made me aware that you can only upgrade content databases and not just standard SharePoint system databases using PowerShell http://blogs.technet.com/b/blairb/archive/2010/07/16/patching-sharepoint-2010-on-windows-7.aspx.

Another article relating to this was found here where no solution had actually been found (at the time of blogging) http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-IE/sharepoint2010setup/thread/7d3ee7cf-56f8-46fe-b2c9-b8662e88825a

So concluding that I could only upgrade content databases the above did not help in resolving the issue.

The two databases in question were:

Database – Type

WSS_Search - SPSearchDatabase

WSS_UsageApplication - SPUsageDatabase

I finally managed to resolve the problem by running a b2b upgrade command:

PSConfig.exe -cmd upgrade -inplace b2b -force -cmd applicationcontent -install -cmd installfeatures

Credit to this blog (http://blog.techgalaxy.net/archives/2585) for pointing out the b2b command as I was having issues running this prior to finding this.

People Picker Searchcustomquery vs. Searchcustomfilter property

2011-06-22T22:49:00.001+01:00

So I wanted to share an issue I recently had with the people picker which I have to admit was due to user error on my part but you may fall into the same trap!

So the trap I fell into was that I assumed the SharePoint staadm peoplepicker only had one configuration option for querying AD and this is where I went wrong!

So if you follow this TechNet guide for the people picker this is why I believe it isn't as clear as I thought! http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc263318(v=office.12).aspx (appreciating this is for MOSS it was suggested this was still applicable to SharePoint 2010).

If you notice from the previous URL it suggests that there is only stsadm -o setproperty -pn peoplepicker-searchadcustomquery available for AD queries so I pursued this route to find very strange results appearing when searching for users. For example lets say I told my parameter only to return users where they have a phone number this command above returned anyone who had a phone number regardless of what you entered in the search term.

So after lots of head scratching I realised after taking a step back that rather than look at the parameters appended to the command I needed to look at the makeup of the command. On closer inspection I realised that there are 2 types of AD commands applicable to the people picker -pn peoplepicker-searchadcustomquery and -pn peoplepicker-searchadcustomfilter (The latter being the actual command I needed) from reading this further TechNet article which actually does the opposite to the previous article and does not mention the query command http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/gg602075.aspx#section8.

Hopefully you can see how easily it was to be confused. So I after the light bulb moment I quickly changed the command and after hours of failure doubting the structure of the LDAP query I realised it was a simple mistake everything worked like a dream.

So to conclude on the commands:

Stsadm -o setproperty -pn peoplepicker-searchadcustomquery – THIS WILL SHOW RESULTS BASED UPON THE QUERY YOU PLACE HERE REGARDLESS OF THE VALUE ENTERED INTO THE PEOPLEPICKER

Stsadm -o setproperty -pn peoplepicker-searchadcustomfilter – THIS WILL SHOW RESULTS BASED UPON FILTERING A VALUE APPLICABLE.

I’m not entirely sure why you would use the customquery option so this is why I didnt wven give it a second thought this existed. If anyone has any scenario’s where this could be used I’d be interested to hear from you.