Analytics software can be invaluable when it comes time to prove the worth of the SharePoint site you migrated your company’s intranet from, or when seeking that budget increase for more hardware.

The problem is with the nature of SharePoint sites being fluid, in that they are constantly changing as the data they serve is being updated or consolidated.  New features and web parts are being added, and so the code under the hood is always evolving.

This brings me to the problem I faced when a customer needed assistance in setting up analytics software on the SharePoint site.

There are plenty of sites that will walk explain the integration for MOSS 2007 and Google Analytics (GA), but none that I found for WSS 3.0.

The site I am working with is using a combination of default and custom Master Pages. 

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An incredibly useful feature of SharePoint Document libraries is their ability to use the WebDAV protocol to be accessed via Windows Explorer.

The below scenarios will use screen shots and steps from a Windows XP Pro SP3 workstation that is NOT bound to the same domain as the SharePoint Implementation.  This mimics behavior that would be seen by a kiosk or dedicated printing workstation. The SharePoint installation is based on SharePoint Services 3.0 SP2, running on Windows Server 2003 (IIS 6) with WebDAV extensions allowed.

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  One of the biggest user peeves with SharePoint is the authentication prompts.  I get questions about this all the time, so I thought I would explain some simple configuration changes either you or your system administrator can implement to make your SharePoint experience just a bit better.

There are 2 scenarios that I will cover:

1. Visiting the site from your work network; this assumes your workstation is bound to the same domain as the SharePoint implementation.
2. Visiting a SharePoint site of another company, such as an extranet for a partner company.  This would assume your workstation is bound to a different domain than the SharePoint implementation –or- Visiting the site from a workstation that is not bound to any domain (home computer or workgroup).

There are of course scenarios where you will get prompted regardless, in case 2 above, if you open a Microsoft Office document (Excel, Word, etc), after the corresponding Office application opens, you will be presented with a dialogue box requesting your credentials.  This is by design, meaning when the Office application opens, it is initiating a new session to the server, this new session does not have access to the credentials you offered up when initially logging into the site.

If you fall into the category of case 1, and you are being prompted for credentials when opening Office documents from SharePoint libraries, follow the procedure described for that scenario.

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If you’re like me, this is definitely in your Top 10 WSS/MOSS 2007 requests.

Never fails, the database server is provisioned with less than adequate storage, or the company utilization and adoption of SharePoint has been more than successful. 

None the less, the SharePoint and related databases have or are on track to outgrow their environment.  This used to be a trial and error procedure, as there was no clear documentation from Microsoft, and community documentation was, less than complete.

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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