I had a look at implementing MS IT Site Life Cycle Management as an alternative to AvePoint products, or the previously blogged-about MS IT Site Delete Capture utility:
http://www.codeplex.com/governance/Release/ProjectReleases.aspx?ReleaseId=4622
Unfortunately, this product just is not going to work for us. It is possible that we could wrangle it into shape with enough time, and an ability/desire to [...]
“Site Delete Capture LE” from Microsoft IT… cool idea, tricky to implement. Here is the problem:
Attempts to delete a site result in “Access Denied” error messages in the site delete log files. No corresponding events found in the Security Event logs, nor are we able to detect any “ACCESS DENIED” messages using procmon.exe. What’s up?
Well, [...]
Hey look… Microsoft IT has released some cool tools for SharePoint management:
http://governance.codeplex.com/
Possibly of most use would be:
http://www.codeplex.com/governance/Release/ProjectReleases.aspx?ReleaseId=14351
A utility to automatically backup sites upon deletion actions.
And:
http://www.codeplex.com/governance/Release/ProjectReleases.aspx?ReleaseId=4622
Site Lifecycle Management – a potential replacement for the hated “Site Expiration” process we have in place at present.
After two days of troubleshooting some vexing problems with ECTS, I have arrived at a new recommendation concerning this product:
Run Screaming
Okay, that may be a bit damning… here is a qualifier. If you have no SLA with your customers, don’t mind lots of downtime, love C# programming, and otherwise find SharePoint troubleshooting highly amusing, then [...]
I got a report from one of our power users that SharePoint search was not returning any results. The default search service under WSS 3.0 is not very easy to troubleshoot. Things will get better with Search Server 2008 (I hope). Anyway, I did find the following in my Application Event Logs:
After a semi-disaster with SharePoint earlier this week, I have been forced into the view that I really should have our SharePoint infrastructure hosted on more than one web server. To that end, I am planning the deployment of a new, 2+ node Windows SharePoint Services farm.
Initial architecture will be something like this:
Host: SharePoint2
Roles: Web [...]
Users of our ECTS implementation “PartnerPoint” are not an overly happy set. Most of the problems that we have experienced are centered around login errors. This application is particularly prone to login errors for the following reasons:
Randomly generated initial password is too complex – data entry errors cause login denial
Password expiration errors are not transparent [...]
You may have noticed that that “welcome” email message lacks a certain freshness after awhile. Further, it is entirely devoid of any information that might help users find help on your local instance of SharePoint. How, then, to modify this rather stale bit of HTML?
I found the answer though our friends in the TechNet Social:
http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/sharepointcustomization/thread/e4a34a49-af24-4437-8148-2bd6237013c0/
Who [...]
Decision Points:
Need to decide…
Where to host ADAM – We want it replicated for additional fault tolerance:
The best option may be to run it on each SharePoint server in your farm… ADAM supports clustering via network load balancing. If you have setup up NLB for SharePoint, it then should not be too difficult to set it [...]
They pulled me out of my dungeon to do some public speaking this week. FWIW, here is the slide stack that I used for the presentation…
PowerPoint 2007 version:
http://www.uvm.edu/~jgm/seminars/MM2008-CollaboratingWithSharePoint.pptx
PDF Version:
http://www.uvm.edu/~jgm/seminars/MM2008-CollaboratingWithSharePoint.pdf
I am going to assume that the use of any copyrighted content in this presentation falls under “fair use”, but IANAL, so send me that DMCA takedown [...]