I got a call while I was at TecEd2007 (more on that coming soon) Tuesday that no one could post anything in the Area sections on our SPS intranet implementation. What Fun!! We have all our information that is (one to many) stored not on WSS Sites but on SPS Areas for easy navigation, search and many other reasons. So we have all these documents that live under http://myportal/Xcompany , http://myportal/ycompany and http://myportal/C12 … so on and so forth. No one could post any more document sin these sections on Tuesday and go the typical “Form validation Error: Your changes could not be saved because this SharePoint website has exceeded the storage quota limit. You must save your work on another location….”

I have seen this before on team sites and it’s an easy fix , you go and increase the quota of the top level site and you are done. How does one increase the quota of all the area sections under the top level site “http://myportal/, in this question is the answer? http://myportal is a top level site and all the areas sections are sub-sites underneath it with the difference that they have the portal templates. When I put http://myportal/ in the window below…

I got the following response…

The current storage is almost 4 GB and it was set to a limit of 500 MB. I guess on the TechEd 2007 Tuesday it decided to implement the quota limit of 500 Mb??

Once I removed the checkmarks and set it to an individual quota of unlimited space, everything was fine and everyone was able to start posting documents again. Weird. This is workaround makes sense but don’t know why it kick started after it reached almost 10 times its quota limit. If anyone has an answer , please leave a comment.

On another note, I plan to blog at least twice a week now after listening /reading and talking to Joel Olson at TechEd 07. His jokes are moderately funny but his blogs are immensely insightful.

One of my clients has a medium server SharePoint farm. Two front end servers configured with 4 GB’s of RAM and 1000 users pounding these boxes number of times every day. Being a medium server farm implementation no real performance testing was done on the server to determine memory and processor needs. We ended up ordering top of the line HP servers and max’d them with 4 GB’s of memory.

I set the /3GB switch to maximize the use of RAM by SharePoint. The IIS worker process was configured to recycle if it uses greater than 700 MB’s. This ensured optimal load times and performance of the Sharepoint portal server.

I

After this configuration set up, I found that the worker process was recycling at least 3 times an hour. A number of times recycling the worker process would fail and cause IIS related errors within SharePoint. I know that SharePoint wasn’t really using all the memory it had available on the server. Increasing the maximum used memory for the worker process to recycle beyond 850 MB as this would cause performance degradation.

To configure the Web garden correctly is the answer. You can specify the number of worker process (w3p.exe) in a Web garden by following the process below.

To configure a Web garden by using IIS Manager

The key is to balance worker process with memory. Specifically if you have 3 GB’s of memory available for SharePoint to use it would make sense to have a web garden with 2 or 3 worker processes. Keep in mind if you have other application running on the same server you need to account for those in terms of memory as well. At a minimum you have the SharePoint Central Admin worker process on the front end machine.

See below how the two w3p.exe processes are utilizing optimal amount of memory. This setting has resulted in my worker processes recycling from 3 times in an hour to once or twice a day resulting in better performance , availability and reliability. Here is an interesting link on IIS 6.0 performance tuning.

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/community/events/iis/tnt1-89.mspx/maintain/optimize/perflink.mspx

Test post using Windows Live Writer Beta …you can find it here..

http://windowslivewriter.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!D85741BB5E0BE8AA!174.entry

We prepared Active Directory in Part 1 of this article. Exchange 2003 is installed on Exch1 and Exch2 and Exchange 2007 will be installed on Exch3. The exchange 2007 installation is going to be “typical” which means only the following three roles will be installed, Mailbox server, Client Access server and Hub Transport server.Before we begin with the installation of Exchange 2007 on Exch3.training.local we need to confirm the following components exist on the server.

• Enable network COM+ access
• Internet Information Services
• World Wide Web Service
• ASP.NET v2.0

From within the Exchange 2007 folder in the command prompt, type setup.com.

Select typical installation and browse to where you want exchange installed, in my case on the G Drive.

I selected Exch2 (Exchange 2003 server) to be used as a server to which Exchange 2007 will connect in order to allow interoperability of mail flow with exchange 2003.

See below how the Organization Prerequisites were completed but the pre requisites for the other roles failed. Exchange 2007 needs an update applied to the .net framework that can be found here.

Once the update was applied, the prereq’s completed successfully and now onto the installation of the first Exchange 2007 server in the organization.

And that’s it!! Exchange 2007 is installed into the org.

I have a single domain lab network called training.local , 2 server running Exchange 2003 , I am trying to introduce a third Exchange 2007 Server and transition users from Exchange 2003 to Exchange 2007.

Step 1: Install MMC 3.0

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=4C84F80B-908D-4B5D-8AA8-27B962566D9F&displaylang=en

Step 2: Install Windows Power Shell 1.0

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=10EE29AF-7C3A-4057-8367-C9C1DAB6E2BF&displaylang=en

Step 3: Prepare Legacy Exchange Permissions

If you are currently running any Exchange 2000 or 2003 server the first command you must run is

Setup.com /PrepareLegacyExchangePermissions

Here it fails because I don’t have all the Exchange 2003 servers in the org running SP2.

Second time lucky

Step 4: Prepare Schema

Run the following command using a schema admin account (Since this is a lab I am running this process as the godfather of the domain i.e. enterprise admin)

Setup.com /PS

PS is short for prepare schema

Step 5: Prepare Active Directory

This command created the additional security groups that exchange 2007 introduces in AD.

Setup.com /PrepareAD

Did not see a short-hand for this command….just type the full command or use tab after typing in the first few words , power shell completes the command for you.

Note: If you have not completed Step 3, setup /PrepareAD will perform the PrepareLegacyExchangePermissions step. To complete the PrepareLegacyExchangePermissions step, the domain in which you run this command must be able to contact all domains in the forest. If you are also a member of the Schema Admins group, and if you have not completed Step 2, setup /PrepareAD will perform the PrepareSchema step.

Verify that this step completed successfully, make sure that there is a new organizational unit (OU) in the root domain called Microsoft Exchange Security Groups. This OU should contain the following new Exchange USGs:

Step 5.1 Prepare Active Directory

None of these setup commands apply to me right now since I just have one domain training.local which was already prepared when I ran the \PrepareAD switch. But just as a reference.

• Run setup /PrepareDomain to prepare the local domain. Note that you do not need to run this in the domain where you ran Step 3. Running setup /PrepareAD prepares the local domain.
• Run setup /PrepareDomain:<FQDN of domain you want to prepare> to prepare a specific domain.
• Run setup /PrepareAllDomains to prepare all domains in your organization.

AD is now prepared…moving on to the next step on installing Exchange 2007 next week!

Ref: http://www.msexchange.org/tutorials/Installing-Exchange-2007-Part1.html

Test Blog using MS word 2007

Support for .NET Framework 2.0, ASP.NET 2.0, and Visual Studio® 2005  

Windows SharePoint Services with SP2 supports running on the Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0, which includes ASP.NET 2.0. Note that SharePoint Portal Server, on the other hand, will not support .NET Framework 2.0, even with SP2. The next major releases of both Windows SharePoint Services and SharePoint Portal Server will both be based on, and hence make extensive use of, ASP.NET 2.0 and its multitude of new features. From a developer’s perspective, Windows SharePoint Services with SP2 simply runs on the new CLR. Windows SharePoint Services has not been redesigned to take advantage of any of the new major features of ASP.NET 2.0, such as Master Pages and the Web Part Framework. However, the new class libraries are certainly available to custom Web Parts, pages, event handlers, and so on. There are two supported scenarios in which you can create your Windows SharePoint Services implementation with support for .NET Framework 2.0: 

         Side-by-side installation of .NET Framework versions 1.1 and 2.0 You can install Windows SharePoint Services on a server on which .NET Framework version 1.1 and version 2.0 are both installed. If you plan to eventually install SharePoint Portal Server on this server, do not install .NET Framework 2.0. Additionally, you can also run ASP.NET 1.1 and ASP.NET 2.0 side by side on different Microsoft Internet Information Services (IIS) Web applications that are running Windows SharePoint Services with SP2. In this scenario, you can create custom extensions to Windows SharePoint Services that leverage the new features of .NET Framework 2.0, such as custom administrative tools.

         Installation of .NET Framework version 2.0 only  In this scenario, Windows SharePoint Services runs with .NET Framework 2.0, and .NET Framework 1.1 is not installed. However, running Windows SharePoint Services with .NET Framework 2.0 still provides the same features and functionality as running Windows SharePoint Services with .NET Framework 1.1. In some cases, ASP.NET 2.0 enhanced its security by locking down operations that were possible in ASP.NET 1.1. Some of these lockdowns are incompatible with Windows SharePoint Services and must be disabled for the application to function correctly. For more information about how to configure Windows SharePoint Services to support .NET Framework version 2.0, see Overview: Windows SharePoint Services 2.0 SP2 Beta in Windows Server 2003 R2.

Running .NET Framework 1.1

It is not required that you upgrade any Windows SharePoint Services 2.0 installations to ASP.NET 2.0. Support for ASP.NET 2.0 is provided to accommodate users who want to update their computers with the latest version of .NET Framework, or leverage development improvements in the new version of ASP.NET.

Upgrading to .NET Framework 2.0

Although it is not required that you upgrade to ASP.NET 2.0, there are many improvements to the development platform and environment in that release of the framework. The Windows SharePoint Services 2.0 object model and SOAP services are fully supported for use in ASP.NET 2.0 applications. To leverage ASP.NET 2.0 Web Parts in Windows SharePoint Services, a wrapper Web Part must be written to make the ASP.NET 2.0 Web Part appear to be a Windows SharePoint Services Web Part. After this is done, your ASP.NET 2.0 Web Part should function normally within your Windows SharePoint Services pages. Wrapper Web Parts will not be required in the next version of Windows SharePoint Services or the next version of SharePoint Portal Server (code named Office “12″ SharePoint Servers), which both natively support ASP.NET 2.0.

In most SharePoint Portal Server installations, it is better to continue to use the current technologies that are supported natively in the product — that is, ASP.NET 1.0 and .NET Framework 1.1 — rather than mixing the platforms.   

I recently configured my Exchange 2003 SP2 for Active Sync and Direct Push email and I must say I am greatly impressed by its capabilities. For a quick and easy video on how to configure this visit the Exchange Team blog video here: http://msexchangeteam.com/videos/9/train/entry426996.aspx  I have the HP 6945 PDA phone that works great with the Exchange 2003 SP2, I have owned a black berry before and I must say this, e-mail’s sent directly from the Exchange servers are prettier and more reliable than those sent from the blackberry.  Listed are some of the improvements that I got from the tech-ed interview with Max Ciccotosto to the Exchange 2007 version of Exchange Active Sync. Most of these were desperately needed and I with these improvements now that empower the administrator, I must say, I wouldn’t invest in any RIM stock at this point! 

Mobility features on Exchange 2007 

·        Flagging Items like you are used to in Outlook 2003/2007. 

·        HTML Email , bringing richness of HTML email onto the PDA 

·        Easily download the entire message. In Exchange 2007 you will be able to download the message inline and real time rather than wait and click for the message to download today. 

·        Email message with a link can be clicked and fetched from your corporate intranet without requiring any VPN.  

·        Search on the device, you have limited number of emails on the device. In Exchange 2007, you can search your mailbox through your device. 

·        Improvements in appointments and calendar with Exchange 2007. 

·        Introduction out of office support in Exchange 2007 which currently doesn’t exist on the device today. 

·        Will you need another client to run Exchange 2007? Windows Mobile 5.0 with MSFP will be able to experience most of the improvements. At the same time to benefit from every new feature, you will most likely need a new version of the client. 

·        Benefits on the administration side include : 

o       Policy control is more granular. You can create
Mobile mailbox policies for example you can create a separate policy for your execs, consulting and sales people. 

o       Password manager for the device, specify history, complexity among other things for the password. o       Improvements with management of attachments in an email. 

o       You know what devices users are using, what they are doing etc. You get a lot of information on users and their devices. 

 o       Can a user be locked to a device? Yes, you can do it now, you can restrict a user to a specific device by using the device ID of a device.

 o       Reporting capabilities? Increased reporting capabilities. You can go to the server level as well, data coming in and coming out? Is the server overloaded? 

The SharePoint People search works very well out of the box but it has one flaw , it displays more than people when you do a people search , it displays documents related to those people as well !

When you search for a users , say Edward. It starts with displaying all of the document that Edward has shared in his MySite and then it displays all of the documents in other users MySite that have the word “Edward” in it. This is an annoyance more than anything because it shows the users with the first name Edward right at the bottom of the search , and this really is what you are searching for.

To eliminate the display of user shared documents from being displayed when searches are made for people , I created an exclusion rule for this URL http://my***.com/personal/* this removes all personal site information from being displayed in the searches for people. This exclusion was created on the Portal_Content Index.

You get to it here : Site Settings –> Configure Search and Indexing –> Portal_Content –> Manage Rules to exclude and include content.

Note : This removes the Personal documents from being displayed in the search for All Sources as well as it uses the same content index to search through documents.

If you are wondering the exlcusion rule for http://my**demo.com/*.aspx is in place by default. The reason this exlcusion is in place is so that your index remains clean of supporting files that are a part of most websites , like images ,and client-side java script code.

I am currently working on Microsoft collaboration technologies , namely SharePoint , Exchange and Live Communication Server. The purpose of this blog is to be able to organize my thoughts and findings that I uncover on a daily basis related to these technologies from browsing other blogs , tech articles , web-casts or simply playing with these technologies in my lab. A lot of times I see that when I find something cool I make a mental note of it and over time it gets lost. I want to aggregate those thoughts on this blog.

Most of the material in this blog is not orignal , in that its either information that I have found on other sites or blogs , I will try to be as precise as I can with the citation.This blog is primarily for my consumption and for those users who are interested in similar technologies.

Hopefully this will help me and someone else at some point.

Happy Browsing

-Zulfi