Continue reading »]]> I get asked this question as a consultant by the full-timers at any organization I go to a lot.  Ok time to give this one up for free.  As a SharePoint Administrator thou shalt do the following on a day to day basis on your farm.  No exceptions.

1. Thou shalt check thine health analyzer, it does a good chunk of the rest of the work for you in this regard really.  Thou shalt create custom health analyzer rules if you feel something isn’t covered adequately.  Now it’s rare that I’ve seen a perfect health analyzer in SharePoint (no notifications), but yellow items should at least be looked at, and red items should be addressed as typically a red item means functionality is being impacted.
2. Thou shalt check the error logs in Windows.  Red and Yellow stuff from all around the server congregates here.  At a minimum I set the logging thresholds so both errors and warnings wind up in the Windows logs and check here periodically.
3. SharePoint Trace Logs, these get large, but I’d still like to see you look at anything flagged as “unexpected” in there.
4. SQL Server, even if you do have a DBA, check to see if backups, maintenance plans, etc. went off ok that night. It’ll be your butt, not his if something failed and a restore is called for that day.
5. Performance, take a once over on all the major sites on your farm, something not “feel right”?  Walk through memory, Disk I/O, CPU, etc. until you pinpoint things a little better.

And by now it’s time for lunch, maybe the rest of your day can be spent on a project

Continue reading »]]> Well this weekend was a good productive trip.  I still have to wonder how the fish is about $2-$4/pound cheaper than when I was in Seattle.  Guess it helps buying in bulk…

I’m not sure where I want to go with the daily King Sooperism right now, I’d like to be a bit more insightful than just simpliy posting bargains there.  I’ll just say the bargains were decent, the people friendliy as always and the atmosphere again nice as always.  I did wind up spending $190 but $75 of that was in gift cards at face value.  Some highlights were tuna at about $9/lb, corn running about $0.50 an ear and some awesome Pineapple

Continue reading »]]> I didn’t realize it at first when I visited their homepage, but guess what content management system King Soopers is using?  That’s right, my favorite tool, SHAREPOINT!!

Now I really love ‘em

Though that brings up an interesting question, how many people bother to view the source of a page they’re at.  Of course I can spot a SharePoint page a mile away when I look at the source but more often than not I wouldn’t bother.

Now I really need to feature them more often on my blog though.

Continue reading »]]> We all know how important security is on the Internet right?  Apparently Oracle does all too well…

So I needed to download the Oracle Data Tools for Visual Studio.  The first obstacle in doing so is that I even need to create an Oracle Developer Account and give them a bunch of details just to get some device drivers.  This compares to Microsoft where I can pretty much just find and download anything that’s free from Microsoft.com.  So we wonder why SQL Server continues to grab market share from Oracle.

After downloading and installing these drivers, I discovered that I needed a second set for another server running 64 bit.  So I hop back over to Oracle and am given a login.  For most of my non-essential passwords I have a common, weak password (or what’s the worst you’re gonna do if you hack my Oracle Dev Account, download more drivers? This isn’t my Bank Account you know…) of course Oracle makes me pick a password that has policies that are incompatible with any password I typically use, requiring me to generate a whole new password for myself, and therefore I’ve already forgotten it on login.

So I try a few logins, and after about the 10th attempt they lock me out…WHAT???  Why are you locking me out of an account that can at best download drivers?  Afraid I might actually install something?  They tell me to “Contact my Administrator to unlock me.” Excuse me, I’m my own Administrator, should I start talking to myself?  I suppose I could find an Oracle number, call, wait 10 hours for support and finally get my account unlocked, or I can send an email and get a response in 2 weeks, if ever…

So fine Oracle if you don’t want me to download drivers, I won’t then at Microsoft the downloads are free.  Smell ya later…

As a further post script, because I had to do this for a client, I finally went ahead and created a new account, let’s see, “Please Select a Country” I just drop to one of the first things on the menu: Bhutan.  For a city name (with all do respect to the people of Bhutan): upyourbhuttan is my new city name.  Please enter your email address, well first I typed my home email but apparently that was taken (probably by me awhile back), so I quickly create a new email address at bhutan@myemail.com.  So if Oracle is ever wondering about their new registrant in upyourbhuttan, Bhutan, blame me :-p

Continue reading »]]> One thing Grocery Stores do that continually annoys me, why do you shuffle your products around on different aisles?  Just when you think you got the store memorized…

King Soopers just recently decided to shuffle everything around in my supermarket again.  Now I get to be all confused when I go there.  For example the Dishwasher soap was once found in the center of the store, now I have to look near the produce department.  I thought it made more sense earlier…

Presumably they’re doing it to entice me to spend more, as if I wander around aimlessly I’m likely to find more products I might be interested in.  But nowadays I run a pretty tight shopping list when I go in.  I would say only about $20 worth of purchases (out of $150 total spending this week) was likely impulsive in the store.  That amounted basically to some steak and corn that looked like it would be good on the Barbecue.

I’m wondering if I should start a weekly column about my rants and raves on King Soopers.  After all I spend maybe 20% of my budget there between food and gas…weekly King Sooperism anyone?  Yes I’ll be the only blog where SharePoint and King Soopers get mentioned on the same page

Continue reading »]]> Here’s mine, what’s yours?

• Customizable Sandboxing, perhaps allow me to extend the sandbox in my own direction, so if I want the Sandboxed users to be able to access Web Servers or call outside their site collection, let me shoot myself in the foot
• How about the ability to create lists that speak directly to SQL Server out of the box?  Not having to do things with BCS or 3rd party utils.
• Lots of people use their own security with SQL Server Membership.  How about a tool that does all the heavy lifting for a Web App that sets it up for the SQL Server Membership provider?  That is, creates a membership provider DB, makes all the necessary entries in web.config, sets up initial permissions in SharePoint, etc.
• More flexible options for Mirroring content in other farms that don’t need to involve third-party utilities, perhaps the ability to publish content to different farms via some sort of shipping method…

These are some of my big ones offhand.  I might add more as I see it.

Continue reading »]]> If anyone was wondering what rock I’ve been under the last 2 weeks, my apologies.  But I was engaged rather intensively at a client of ours.  In a nutshell a process of theirs was malfunctioning and we basically had a few issues to complicate things:

• Few knew how the process really worked as it was a yearly process, and those that knew weren’t very communicative on the subject
• The code base was 10 years old, nobody really understood it and the original developers, and the developers after that who may have had an understanding were long gone…
• The technology was VBA for Microsoft Access 2003, far from optimal and the skill base for this is long deteriorated (I still remember a little but this was a refresher course for me that’s for sure).
• Of course this was urgent…

If some of these issues had concise documentation on all the step by step procedures needed to run the process, this would have been far easier.  Instead 4 consultants and a lot of billable hours later, we finally concluded some data was corrupt, deleted it and restarted the process.  If we had known this, one person and 7 hours could have run the process needed.

Well hey that’s why they pay me the big bucks.

Continue reading »]]> So I’m looking for some resources to help pass Exam 70-573.  Legitimate resources only need apply, thank you very much

So what’s the first thing I do, I type Exam 70-573 Help into Bing, and what is result 1?  A brain dump site.

All I can say Microsoft is I’m very disappointed in your own search engine bringing up results that are accessories to violating a policy that you laid down and claim to enforce…

(or is it really a Shell Site for Microsoft to see who goes for this brain dump?)

Anyways let’s try Google from Exam help…maybe they do better with anti-cheating.

So result one from Google?  Microsoft’s official exam site.  I’ve already been there, but hey at least they do a better job.  Though brain dump sites exist further down the page.

Continue reading »]]> One thing that materialized out of my time in Seattle was a good feel for how patches and service packs are done at the high level in SharePoint, when you have 10 production servers in a single farm in SharePoint, I’ll call this the “Seattle SharePoint upgrade Protocol”.

Basically the requirements in our Service Pack/December 2011 Cumulative Update patching on the Seattle production farm were as follows:

• The timing had to be within a 10 hour window
• Rolling back once committed was a lousy option, this HAD to work

To first help with these 2, time was given to test upgrade on a Certification farm, which while similar to the production farm, actually ran on hardware inferior to the production farm.  But this allowed us to:

• Carefully monitor the upgrade process, and fix any issues that were to occur to help with point 2
• Get timings so we had a very good idea how long it would take for point 1, this way we could plot for worst case scenario.  It turns out we managed within the 10 hour window.

Anyways the process looked about as follows:

First, we snapshot all the Virtual Machines and back up all the Content databases (if you’re using Physical machines, I’d still suggest taking full images somewhere).  I know this seems like we’re planning for a requirements violation, but we’re not Hernán Cortés; we don’t scuttle our ships in the Harbor…

Once done, the second major step would be to quiesce the farm and unmount all content databases.  I really don’t like the idea of users making things inconsistent while we upgrade everything around them.  Quiescing is accomplished with stsadm –o quiescefarm –maxduration <<time until fully quiesced>> and dismount-spcontentdatabase in a PowerShell prompt will handle your DB Dismount.

Next step, start with the SharePoint Foundation Packs first, let’s install SharePoint Foundation server service pack 1.  This one is often the “Canary in the Coal Mine” so to speak and will often have the issues before everyone else does.  Also at this point install all SharePoint foundation Service Pack 1 Language Packs you intend to run (skip if you’re fine with the default language).  I hope this isn’t too many.

For the third step, run psconfig on each server one at a time per server.  Run the install in series if you will, do not run simultaneously on all servers.   Your command would be psconfig –cmd upgrade –inplace b2b –wait –force when all servers are done on the farm now for the next steps.

For the fifth and sixth step, repeat similar to steps 3 and 4 with the preferred cumulative update for SharePoint Foundation (I usually use the December 2011 SharePoint Foundation Cumulative update).  Remember this is Foundation, not server.  Note language packs don’t apply to cumulative updates.

Now stop and grab a quick cup of coffee if all went well.  Also note that if any server asks for a reboot, feel free to do so.  You may occasionally run into errors.  My most commonly hit error is the concurrency issue as described (with solution) here: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/jamesway/archive/2011/05/23/sharepoint-2010-clearing-the-configuration-cache.aspx.

But in all reality who knows what you will run into?

Next up for steps seven and eight, it is time to install SharePoint Server 2010 Service Pack 1.  This one can be a biggie, with timings often taking an hour or longer.  Similar to steps  three and four, install the media parallel, run psconfig in series.  Also install all SharePoint Server 2010 Service Pack 1 language packs that you intend to install before running psconfig again.

Almost there!  Time for the SharePoint 2010 Cumulative update.  Install in a similar protocol to what you’re now used to and you’re done!  Then just unquiesce the farm (stsadm –o unquiescefarm) and remount your content databases with mount-spcontentdatabase  as well as upgrade-spcontentdatabase to upgrade the content databases to the latest schema.  Make sure you develop a decent test plan for making sure everything came up ok, this should include but is not limited to:

• Manual check of all sites
• Check database and patch status on Each Server (look in Central Administration -> Upgrade Settings -> Check server patch status)
• Checking that upgrade-spcontentdatabase executed properly
• Check all custom applications, different things can happen in SP1
• User Profile service, like always, will need some TLC
• Try a incremental (or better still if you can afford the time, full) crawl of all content sources, everything still returning?

Continue reading »]]> A recurring theme in my blog has been “what motivates people to give?” starring mostly me as when I give to a beggar.  This time I think I have another possible motivation, read on about my latest motivation.

So I’m walking down the street, at the intersection I meet up with a guy who says “Hey I have good news!”

Me: “Huh?”

Stranger: I just saved 15% on my car insurance by switching to GEICO!

(A little background, this phrase was one of the first advertising jingles my daughter learned and she still gets a kick out of it, so it just tugged at a heartstring and sparked me thinking about my daughter).

Me: Proud of ya!

Him: Why did the white guy cross the road?

Me: Ok…

Him: To chase after the black guy that just took his stuff…

Onward he goes telling me a pile of jokes.  Then gets to the business of telling me he’s a street comedian and does this for a few bucks in tips, and what a dollar does, then a five dollar bill, and as I’m getting out my wallet and only see two twenty-dollar bills says “well that twenty can go a long way for a night at a nearby hotel and I’d really appreciate it.” I eyeball my wallet thinking he’s hardly worth a twenty but say “ok cough up one more joke that can make me laugh and it’s yours.” I can’t quite remember the joke but it did make me laugh, and he walked away twenty dollars richer…but hey he definitely brightened up my evening.

Lessons to be learned here:

1) Offer something in return if you’re going to be a beggar, just 5 minutes of conversation can mean a lot to a lonely business traveller

2) Your subject being lightly inebriated couldn’t hurt (I did have 2 beers at the local bar nearby, but he probably didn’t know that)

So a casual beggar with the one line of “spare some change?” doesn’t work.  Get some imagination and the rewards can be rich.