A heads up to invite everyone to the next meeting of the Sydney Business & Technology user group where I will be giving one of the sessions on using SharePoint as an enterprise Search platform.
Feeling rather inspired by the SEO & SEM (search engine optimization/marketing) from the last user group by Fred Schebesta, I am going to talk about using Search within the boundaries of the organisation, so this should be quite interesting as we talk about some of the subtle differences between whats needed within the company as opposed to what works out in the web landscape.
When: Wednesday 29 August 2007
Where: 6:30pm - 8:30pm
Microsoft Sydney Office
Theatre 2
1 Epping Road
North Ryde NSW
Friday, August 3, 2007
Tuesday, April 24, 2007
Reduce information overload and save time and money for your business
We are running SDM Seminar for Knowledge Managers around Enterprise Search and Information Management over the next week or so:
The challenge for Knowledge Managers is to find tools which aid them and encourage employees to share information leading to bottom line cost reductions across the business. Nearly half of all labour costs are now allocated to employees performing so-called ‘Information work’. And so with a typical information worker spending up to a 25% of their time searching for the right information to complete a given task, some organisations could be frittering away their staff costs.
It makes good business sense to make the information access and knowledge management process as productive as possible, and one way in which organisations can reduce the burden associated with information work is to implement an enterprise search and find solution.
The hands-on workshop is designed to:
The challenge for Knowledge Managers is to find tools which aid them and encourage employees to share information leading to bottom line cost reductions across the business. Nearly half of all labour costs are now allocated to employees performing so-called ‘Information work’. And so with a typical information worker spending up to a 25% of their time searching for the right information to complete a given task, some organisations could be frittering away their staff costs.
It makes good business sense to make the information access and knowledge management process as productive as possible, and one way in which organisations can reduce the burden associated with information work is to implement an enterprise search and find solution.
The hands-on workshop is designed to:
- provide an avenue for Knowledge Managers to discuss different issues and road-blocks in managing information
- demonstrate how a tailored Information Management solution can reduce your workload
- provide tips and tools on how you can reduce time and increase productivity through tools which help people help themselves including desktop searches and intranet search
SA
Tuesday, 1 May 2007
Microsoft Office
Level 26, 91 King William Street, Adelaide
NSW
Thursday 3 May 2007
Microsoft Office
Level 2, 1 Epping Road North Ryde
VIC
Tuesday 8 May 2007
Microsoft Office
Level 5, 4 Freshwater Place
Southbank
Sunday, April 15, 2007
Prescan.exe finished with failure
We have started a large upgrade SPS 2003 to MOSS 2007 project for one of our customers. The approach we are taking is to the content database migration upgrade. As confusing as anything with the words migration and upgrade joined together may sound, there is a logic to the approach over the other ways of completing the upgrade, which I will get to later.
An important first step in the upgrade is to run the prescan.exe over your SPS 2003 environment and content database.
On the source SharePoint Portal Server, run the Office SharePoint Server 2007 Prescan utility.
You will need to copy the following files from a base MOSS installation (i.e. from C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\12\BIN)
An important first step in the upgrade is to run the prescan.exe over your SPS 2003 environment and content database.
On the source SharePoint Portal Server, run the Office SharePoint Server 2007 Prescan utility.
You will need to copy the following files from a base MOSS installation (i.e. from C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\12\BIN)
- Prescan.exe
- PREUPGRADESCANCONFIG.XML (if you have created custom site definitions in SPS 2003, then update this file)
The syntax of the command is:
prescan.exe /c preupgradescanconfig.xml /V http://urlofsitecollectiontobeupgraded/
When I first ran this command, the results I got was the scan finished with failure.
And errors like these in my log file:
- Error: The following site has not been scanned. Id = 2ceb5f7d-gb8b-41ff-ad61-0712e0e9098a and Url = test/jr
- Error: The following list has not been scrubbed: Id=2ceb5f7d-gb8b-4c71-b251-0712e0e9098a, Name=Web Part Gallery, Containing Web=personal/alfpha
What I found out here was the prescan was failing because of some orphaned lists that needed to be removed from the content database.
The resolution to this involved:
1. As well as making sure you have SPS 2003 SP2 and WSS SP2, you will net to get this hotfix http://support.microsoft.com/kb/918743
2. Once you have the hotfix, follow the steps on this KB http://support.microsoft.com/kb/918744
• To detect orphaned items, use the following command line:
stsadm -o databaserepair -url http://URLofWindowsSharePointServicesSite -databasename DatabaseName
• To delete orphaned items, use the following command line:
stsadm -o databaserepair -url http://URLofWindowsSharePointServicesSite -databasename DatabaseName -deletecorruption
3. This resolved all my issues but one.
To resolve my last issue also involved using the stsadm command line.
In this case I used it to delete the site /test/jr with the following syntax:
Stsadm –o deletesite –url http://SITENAME/test/jr
From there I was able to successfully run the prescan.exe utility and get to the next step of the upgrade process.
A couple of other good references for similar prescan and orphan issues are:
- William Baer - Understanding PRESCAN.EXE Errors
http://blogs.technet.com/wbaer/archive/2006/12/22/prescan-errors-what-they-mean.aspx - Joel Oleson's SharePoint Land - SharePoint Orphans and Twins - Gotta love the little guys http://blogs.msdn.com/joelo/archive/2006/06/23/644954.aspx
Sunday, March 4, 2007
SharePoint and Reporting Services Integration
I have had the opportunity of the last few days to explore the new integration capabilities of the SharePoint and SQL Reporting Services recently released courtesy of SQL 2005 SP2 with my co-worker Nick Barclay.
As a SharePoint specialist, it's great to see the release of another integration capability that further deepens the relationship between SharePoint and the rest of the MS product family. This is another sign of the convergence into the SharePoint sun that knowledge workers will orbit around in the coming years.
Troubleshooting SQL 2005 SP2 installation
First of all, I had some problems installing SQL 2005 SP2, so if you do have this problem, this is the work around that worked for the VPC image I was testing on.
Error message when you try to install a SQL Server 2005 service pack or a SQL Server 2005 hotfix package: "Error 29528. The setup has encountered an unexpected error while Setting Internal Properties"
http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=925976
Installation and Configuration
Sources
- SharePoint Team Blog
Microsoft SQL Server 2005 SP2 Reporting Services integration with WSS 3.0 and MOSS 2007
- Liam Cleary's post –
MOSS2007 – Reporting Services Add-in
http://www.sharepointblogs.com/helloitsliam/archive/2007/02/21/19801.aspx
In terms of installation and configuration, I found that going through these 2 articles put me on the right track, so I recommend following these. The one thing I did find a little bit different compared to Liams post in the Application Management > Grant Database access, my SQL server name was already configured (same machine) and when I went into it and was asked to enter credentials, I entered the admin credentials, I got 'Unable to log on with the given username and password'. At first this bugged me but in the end I thought it would be ok and it turned out to be the case.
Working with Samples
To road test the new capabilities I grabbed some of the SQL sample databases from:
SQL Server 2005 Samples and Sample Databases (February 2007)
Grab and install:
- SqlServerSamples.msi -- 25,469 KB
- AdventureWorksDBCI.msi -- 29,177 KB (case-insensitive collation)
- AdventureWorksBICI.msi --
Open All Programs > Microsoft SQL Server 2005 > SQL Server Business Intelligence Development Studio
Open the solution AdventureWorks Sample Reports.sln found at
Go into Properties in AdventureWorks Sample Reports
Deployment paths need to change deploying to a SharePoint Document Library with settings.
In this case, I am deploying to the reports center site I have at http://sharepoint/reports and creating two folders to be the container for these http://sharepoint/reports/data , http://sharepoint/reports/reports
Given that I haven't changed any of these, this should deploy successfully and if you browse into your site you should be able to browse the reports, proving a successful implementation of the Reporting Services Integration.
I can now see Data and Reports libraries added to my sharepoint site:
We can then go and view some of the reports:
Add a Reporting Services Viewer Web Part
The final step in this walk through is to create and add a web part page that displays the Reporting Services reports.
To do so create a page under pages and a web part as below:
Open the tool pane to configure the web part and browse to the folder, in my case, http://sharepoint/reports/reports and select report.
Tuesday, January 30, 2007
SharePoint Wiki on MSDN
First we had news the US Microsoft website had been moved over to SharePoint Server 2007.
Now in another show of their movement and commitment to web 2.0 applications, Microsoft has launched a SharePoint Wiki on MSDN.
It can be found at http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms550992.aspx
The community grows at large!
Now in another show of their movement and commitment to web 2.0 applications, Microsoft has launched a SharePoint Wiki on MSDN.
It can be found at http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms550992.aspx
The community grows at large!
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
