As Windows Server 2008 takes it’s place in more data centers, serving as a domain controller, design changes are starting to impact end users.

One of these notable changes effects a workflow most users have picked up: browsing the network to find file servers and shares.

We have seen more and more customers call in with an error similar to below (wording may differ from client to client):

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The Cisco NetPro forum is an excellent resource when searching for answers to Cisco specific issues.  To my knowledge Google doesn’t index these forums, but Cisco made a browser plug-in that adds a NetPro forum search option to your browser’s existing search bar.  http://www.cisco.com/web/tsweb/searchplugins/plugin_homepage.html#

Microsoft released 10 new SharePoint themes available now as a free download, check them out here.

Unfortunately, these are Visual Studio 2008 samples that will need to be turned into solutions before they can be deployed.  This will require Visual Studio 2008, a minimum of SharePoint Services 3.0 SP1, and the VS 2008 extensions for SharePoint v1.2.  Well this is great if you’re a developer, or are comfortable with .NET programming…but how about us administrators?

Fortunately for us humble system admins, Daniel Brown has packaged these into a wsp file to simplify the deployment, get the installbits using the link below:

http://www.danielbrown.id.au/Lists/Posts/Post.aspx?ID=256

Just follow the instructions in the readme, he has included scripts to call the appropriate STSADM functions for the installation and deployment.

Thanks Daniel!

To Distro or not to distro…

Our customer needed distribution groups from their various SharePoint sites for creating alerts on shared lists and libraries.  Until now, the site administrator was constantly having to add and manage these alerts all on an individual basis, and since each project the customer works with calls for a new SharePoint site, changes were plentiful.

Initially, when trying to create a group, specifically, mail enable a group from within SharePoint, the admin was receiving an error stating: “The group operation succeeded, but the distribution group could not be updated because of the following error: The Directory Management Service reported the following error: Access denied.”

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After installing WSS3 SP2 on a clean install of Server 2008 x86 SP2 STD, and using SQL 2008 SP1 as the backend, I could not get any search results.  The setup is about as simple of a farm installation you can get, it is for a small number of users, and demonstration purposes, so everything is installed on a single machine virtualized on an HP server running VMware ESXi 3.5.  There are two site collections using different application pools, one enabled for anonymous access, and the other not.

The search service is common to both, but the crawl account (data access) is unique.

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!IMPORTANT!

All installations of Microsoft Office Server 2007 that have installed SP2 for SharePoint Services are affected by the following bulletin.  In short, it has reset your license key putting the product in trial mode, and it will expire in 180 days without notice.  See the below article for the resolution, and more details.

http://blogs.msdn.com/sharepoint/archive/2009/05/21/attention-important-information-on-service-pack-2.aspx