I had forgotten this but if you are *still* installing SharePoint WSS 3.0 in AD Account Creation mode, then the domain name specified at the point of running the product configuration wizard should be the NetBIOS name and not the full domain name.

gadget.lk online shopping experience

The shopping experience was not bad but the aftersales was terrible! So I stumbled on gadget.lk quite by chance - I got an email from Keells Super online asking me to vote for them as the best SL online store or some such thing. I wasn't going to vote for Keells because I had a bad experience the 1 time I used their service. However, I wanted to see what the other sites were like. I found gadget.lk in the list. Since I'd had some trouble with my paypal account in the past and gadget.lk had a lot of the things I generally buy online I thought I'd give them a try.

The site isn't too bad - functional and given that it will probably be techies that use it I didn't have a huge problem with is. However, the car MP3 adapter that I ordered came with a faulty audio cable. I called them and was told the 2.5" to 3.5" audio adapter was thrown in as a bonus. Note that you need this cable to connect a standard MP3 player. However, I was told to bring the faulty cable to Panchikawatte and that they would replace it. I complained that I couldn't get their during the time it was open and the best they could offer was to drop it off on Havelock road if I could send someone to collect it from there. Not exactly professional my friends at gadget.lk are I would be tempted to say.

Note my order number was 62 so I'm thinking not more than 61 orders thus far and if the service stays this way it might not go beyond the 100 mark. I personally will think several times before ordering anything from their again.

BTW the build quality of the MP3 adapter was not good either... but that is to be expected at the price. The mini bluetooth dongle works just fine at the moment that I got from their and the transparent USB hub also is still functioning - though the build quality on the hub looks rather bad as well.

SharePoint Search Customization

A client of mine has an internet facing SharePoint (MOSS 2007) Collaboration site. This site has several pages that use a set of Search Core Result web parts to display documents that have been tagged with specific meta data. Now you are probably thinking this is nothing unusual at all and isn't this how SharePoint is supposed to be used.


One of the requests we got from the client was to create a copy of the production MOSS instance that could be used as a Test Environment. We also knew that a lot of the URLs in the master pages (yep there is more than one master page for this application) and throughout some of the pages were "hard-coded" to the absolute URL of the production environment.

Some of the pages that had the Core Results web part were customized to bring back more columns than are returned by default (I.e. a categorization of documents etc). Some of these columns hadn't been brought over when we migrated the database from production to the test environment. One of the columns that was specified was the "Write" Column. However, I couldn't find a managed property with that name on either the production instance or the new Test instance. So, I (incorrectly, I later found out) created a new managed property called "write" on the Test instance. I then did a complete re-crawl of the content source and did a search. This brought back data, when the search was based on relevance. However, when I did a search by "Modified Date" I got no results back. I went as far as looking at the XML results that are returned from MOSS search and then later displayed using XSLT and found that there were no nodes being returned within the all results node.

However, when I removed the 'write' managed property the web parts started bringing back results by relevance and by modified date.

My conclusion was that there is an implicit managed property called 'write' that is crawled by the MOSS crawler and added to the index. This managed property stores the last modified date of a document or list item etc. This is returned in the results of a search query and is used to order the results when a sort by modified date is performed. When I manually created a managed property called write, this overrode the value that was returned by the search service thus returning a blank value and breaking the view by last modified date.

Debugging Sequential Workflows in Visual Studio 2008

I've been trying to create a fairly simple SharePoint sequential workflow in Visual Studio 2008.This isn't rocket science by any means. And the workflow itself seems to work just fine. However, whenever I stop debugging the workflow in Visual Studio 2008, the entire IDE freezes. It gets out of debugging mode but not completely. It just hangs there.

I've tried re-creating the workflow but something is just not right.

MOSS Migration woes

I have been involved in a MOSS 2007 migration over the last few months. The migration has been from an externally hosted MOSS 2007 instance to an internally hosted virtualized MOSS 2007 instance. The original MOSS 2007 instance has the following 2 server configuration -

Single MOSS Server

• Windows 2003 R2 SP2 (Enterprise Edition)
• Intel Xeon CPU 5140 2.33 GHz 4 CPUs (8GB RAM)
  
• WSS version - 12.0.0.6318 (SP1 + Cumulative Update)

SQL Server

• Windows 2003 R2 SP2 (Enterprise Edition)
• Intel Xeon CPU 5140 2.33 GHz 4 CPUs (8GB RAM)
  
• SQL Server - MS SQL Server 2005 Standard Edition Build 9.00.2047.00

The new MOSS instance hosted internally has the following configuration -

MOSS WFE Servers (2)

• Windows 2008 (Enterprise Edition) x64
  
• VMWare VM (2GB RAM)
  
• WSS version - 12.0.0.6318 (SP1 + Cumulative Update)

MOSS Index Servers

• Windows 2008 (Enterprise Edition) x64
  
• VMWare VM (2GB RAM)
  
• WSS version - 12.0.0.6318 (SP1 + Cumulative Update)

SQL Server (Clustered for fail-over with 2 nodes)

• Windows 2008 (Enterprise Edition) x64
• VMWare VM (2GB RAM)
• SQL Server - MS SQL Server 2005 Standard Edition Build 9.00.2047.00

The main content database and SSP database were backed up off the live site and copied over to the new DB server cluster. After MOSS 2007 was installed, the default content database was removed from MOSS and the migrated content database was attached through MOSS Central Admin. Next the SSP database was attached. A few modifications were required to the search settings etc as the new server was hosted (temporarily) on a different URL. A full crawl on the content sources were also obviously required. I also regenerated the audiences that were in use.

We encountered one particularly puzzling issue related to search. When a search is performed on the new site from a default search page, the search returns the expected results. However, if there are multiple pages of results, attempting to go to another page in the result set brings back the following error -
"Your search cannot be completed because of a service error. Try your search again or contact your administrator for more information."

Also, other static searches done through a URL querystring also fail if the IsDocument property or v=date settings are used.

SharePoint Saturday DC - Release Management Best Practices

So the conference in DC was a great success. For more details see the conference web page. The Sy siblings worked tirelessly and from the feedback a lot of people benefitted from the event.

My presentation was late in the afternoon and I didn't get a chance to sit in on a lot of the sessions that I would have liked to have. Preparation on my part went down to the wire. From what I heard the session was useful to the 25 - 30 people that attended.

The event was hosted by Innovative-e; so we were a bit busy during the conference with a few mundane tasks. It was also great to be in the room with the people whose blogs I rely a fair bit on to solve problems on a fairly regular basis. 

The SharePoint community is definitely one of great collaboration.

Attending SharePoint Saturday DC on the 2nd of May

I'm going to be attending SharePoint Saturday DC on the 2nd of May. This will be the first SP Sat that I am attending and I am extremely excited to be going. I might also be presenting on Release Management Best Practices for SharePoint. This is of course going to be even more exciting for me and I sure hope that it will add value to SharePoint Saturday.

At some point I would like to organize / help organize a similar series of events here in Sri Lanka.

I will at very least post the slide deck and follow-up items on this site.