Thanks again to everyone who came out today and braved the rough weather in Tampa!  I’ve included some links below to the slides as well as the sample alternate CSS and banner image I demoed in the session.

SharePoint Branding For The Rest of Us (slides)

Sample CSS and banner

Also, if you interested in checking out those new themes from Microsoft here’s a link to my colleague, Randy Drisgill’s blog post on them complete with screenshots:

http://blog.drisgill.com/2009/03/microsoft-released-10-new-sharepoint.html

If you were in interested in seeing one of the themes in action with some light customization – or are in the Orlando area and want to check out the Orlando SharePoint User Group check out:

http://www.orlandosharepoint.com

Thanks to everyone who came out to Randy and my session yesterday at SPTechCon!  As some of you noticed, the slide deck we were presenting from had a few changes over the slides that were available from the conference site.  Here are slides we used in the presentation:

Branding Demystified - SPTechCon Boston

Randy should have the code samples up shortly.

Like many SharePointers, I always seem to have an external USB drive hanging off my laptop.  Sure, I have access to a bigger fancier server if needed but for daily tasks I needed a nicer playground.  I decided to finally bite the bullet and get me a nice little server where I can run all of my VMs – and to my surprise the total came out to less than $700!

Here’s the high points:

CPU: AMD Phenom II X3 720 2.8GHz Triple-Core Black Processor

RAM: 2 x 4GB = 8GB (motherboard supports up to 16GB)

Storage: 2 x 640GB Western Digital Caviar

Case: Antec Sonata III

Here’s the receipt:

So before anyone blasts me and says “that isn’t less than $700” – you are correct.  However, there was a promotional code for the case that dropped the price $20 that didn’t get applied, but the fine folks at New Egg have credited it back.  In addition, there’s a $10 rebate on the motherboard.  When all is said and done that means the final shipped price will be $686.54.  Not too shabby if I do say so myself.

Is it the greatest machine ever built?  No way!  But it will have enough horsepower to allow me to run 3-4 VMs at a time and add more RAM in the future to run even more.  Overall, I was pretty proud of the bang for the buck.  And they threw in a free label maker – SCORE!

A quick shout out to the good folks over at AnandTech.  Their frequently updated System Buyer’s Guides are a great resource to anyone looking to put together a system who doesn’t want to spend a ton of extra time matching up components and reading reviews.

Some of you may have seen me tweet about how the simple threat of Conficker cause more problems than the actual virus itself for one client.  Here’s the full story:

I’ve been working with a client for the past weeks and logged in to their server the morning of April 1, 2009.  I went about what I had to do and then decided to take a peek at the Event Viewer on the server.  A few weeks back I did a clean install and the Event Viewer was clean as a whistle so I was pretty much expecting to see the same.  However, here’s what greeted me that morning:

Lots and lots of 6398 and 6482 errors.  There were some 7076 errors thrown into the mix as you can see.  If you’ve never had the pleasure of seeing the error messages up close here’s what they look like:

For the sake of search engines – the 6398 error message is: The Execute method of job definition Microsoft.Office.Server.Administration.ApplicationServerAdministrationServiceJob (ID 9f6421a3-0828-4a26-9def-977f6e5b959a) threw an exception

The 6482 error message is:  Application Server Administration job failed for service instance Microsoft.Office.Excel.Server.ExcelServerSharedWebServiceInstance (dfb065a4-e326-4619-bb9d-2aff38c9cae6).

Since these errors were related to search I opened up the Search Administration page in my SSP and say the crawl status was showing “Error.”  I’d never seen that before, so I shot over an IM to Shane Young and asked if he’d seen that.  He suggested opening up the Search Settings page which he said normally shows a more detailed message.  However, when I tried to open up Search Settings I got a 403 – Access Denied.

It didn’t take long to realize that this was all related to permissions.  I shot an email to my client asking them if they’d recently made any changes to their server and they confirmed that they had.  They recently made changes to a group policy that locked down the access for Administrators to prevent the Conficker virus from doing any damage.  Honestly, I don’t blame them for making the change – they really had no idea it would have any impact on SharePoint.  But alas, it did.

Everything I uncovered in my searching of the interwebs suggested to do two things:

1. Add the local group WSS_WPG to the c:\windows\tasks folder with Read and Write.
2. Reset the accounts used for WSS search

You might be asking yourself “Why the heck does SharePoint need access to c:\windows\tasks?”  The simple answer is that it needs to be able schedule tasks – without access certain tasks like searching won’t get scheduled and therefore won’t happen.  So I went to modify the permissions on the directory– however, I wasn’t able to modify the permissions on c:\windows\tasks despite my administrator permissions.  We first had to remove the group policy that was applied and reboot the server.  Then I was able to modify c:\windows\tasks. 

The next step was to reset the permissions for WSS search.  I opened Central Administration and went to Operations > Services on Server then clicked on Windows SharePoint Services Search and re-entered the credentials for the Service Account and Content Access account.  The problem was it didn’t fix the problem.  Thinking it must be something else, I asked Shane to take a peek and see what he could come up with. 

I’ll spare you all the details but here’s the important part of this post --- what I did was completely correct except for ONE very minor detail.  Changing the group policy modified the permissions on the server and more importantly some of the permissions SharePoint needed.  Removing the group policy didn’t completely undo all of the changes so the accounts needed to be reset.  Simply re-entering the same username and password like I did doesn’t help because SharePoint thinks “oh, that’s the same one I got – no big deal.  No need to make any changes.”  What Shane had me do was change the identity of the Search accounts to something else and then change it back.  What this does is force SharePoint to rewrite the permissions for the account.

After making the change the server was happy again and looked like this:

In summary – be very careful when applying group policies that restrict access to administrators because it might make SharePoint unhappy.  And in the event you run into a permissions issues and need to reset a password in SharePoint it is often best to change the username and password to something else before changing it back.

Hopefully this post will save someone a few hours :-)

The 4th Annual Orlando Code Camp will be this Saturday

What: All day geek fest focusing on code and not marketing fluff.
When: Saturday, March, 28, 2009 All day (registration opens at 7:00am)
Where: Seminole Community College - Sanford\Lake Mary Campus - 100 Weldon Boulevard Sanford, FL 32773
Cost: Free!

Some great SharePoint content from a bunch of great speakers!  For more information check out http://www.orlandocodecamp.com If you are a twitterer you can check out tweets with #occ.  Be sure to come by and say hi, I’ll be hanging in the SharePoint room: