RedKittenMac. Windows. Networking. Wireless. Internet.

Recently we had an issue where a client wanted to find out who had changed the security permissions on a SharePoint site. The first thing to check is that auditing is enabled – go to Site Settings -> Site Collection Administration -> Site Collection Audit Settings and tick the required boxes. If this isn’t enabled already, then you’re out of luck.

In this case, the boxes were ticked but when they tried to access the reports they were told ‘Error: The template could not be found for the specified report.‘ 

Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) is an extremely useful tool for managing Hyper-V and VMWare ESX servers. There is a trial version available from Microsoft in the form of a virtual hard disk (VHD) which you can use to create a new virtual machine with a 180 day evaluation copy already installed. Sounds good, right? Well I thought so too, but I found there were a few issues to resolve before I could use it successfully.

Like many people, a client wanted to import their Active Directory users into SharePoint on a regular schedule. This is easy to configure, but by default the import will bring all the user accounts across – this includes service accounts, test users, and even disabled users. They were using the People Directory webpart from Content and Code, which meant that these users were being displayed in the directory – not what they wanted.

Another quickie – you know sometimes your SharePoint site gets broken, perhaps from a web part not functioning correctly? You know, when you get that helpful error message ‘An unexpected error has occurred’. Isn’t it annoying when you can’t get onto the page in order to access the Site Settings?

There is a simple way to get there though, it’s pretty well known but I’ll post it here anyway in case it helps someone.

While performing some maintenance for a client on their MOSS 2007 server farm, we found that a client was getting the following message when trying to access a page that contained the Bamboo Solutions Hello WebPart – the only option was to disable the offending WebPart.

Everything had worked fine in their test environment, but the production servers reported the following:

Request for the permission of type ‘Microsoft.SharePoint.Security.SharePointPermission, Microsoft.SharePoint.Security, Version=12.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=71e9bce111e9429c’ failed.

While Server Core is undoubtedly a great idea, sometimes you need to make a quick change or you need to check a setting and the relevant command just won’t come to mind. There is a solution! The Core Configurator is a CodePlex project that can be used to administer Server Core installations, and a new version (2.0) was released on the 1st of December 2009.

In a nutshell, it’s a small application that you can either copy to the server or else run from a USB stick or network drive. Here’s how to get it working on your system!

Another nice easy one – today I was asked what the latest version of SharePoint is, and how this information can be found. The easiest way is to visit the Updates Resource Centre for SharePoint and check the chronological list of ‘Major Updates and Issues‘.

To find out which version you’re currently running on your farm, go to ‘Central Administration > Operations > Servers in Farm‘ – at the time of writing, the most recent update is the October 27th 2009 Cumulative Update, which leaves your version number at 12.0.0.6520 – the latest service pack (SP2) leaves the version number at 12.0.0.6421. There are more details about version numbers here if you’re curious.

To install the updates, first install SP2 and then the latest cumulative update package – make sure you get the 64 bit version if that’s what you’re running, sounds obvious but you need to click ’show additional downloads’ on Microsoft’s page to see both x86 and x64 so be aware. You’ll need both the WSS and MOSS update packages – run WSS first on all your servers, then run MOSS on them all, and then finally run the SharePoint Products and Technologies Configuration Wizard on each in turn – this must be done one at a time or you’ll get errors.

Note that Microsoft recommend that you only install the cumulative update packages if you are experiencing the issues that they are intended to resolve – for maximum stability, stick to each Service Pack release.

Another simple one – I was asked today about the meaning of the ‘Search alerts status’ setting on the Search Administration page of SharePoint 2007. Basically, when a user does a search they have the option of saying ‘alert me’ which will tell the system to notify them if any new items are added that meet their search criteria.

Say for example they search for ‘weekly meeting’ and ask to be alerted. Next week when ‘weekly meeting 09′ is added, they should receive a notification. However, if for any reason the index has to be cleared and rebuilt, it’s going to find all the existing items as if they were new and annoy all your users. Therefore if you ever need to rebuild your index, you might want to consider turning off search alerts and then putting them back online once the rebuild is complete.

Here’s a nice simple one – how to change the location of your log files under IIS version 7. This came about because a client had configured their SharePoint farm to have small system partitions, with a larger partition for logging purposes. They had configured the SharePoint logging themselves, but needed the settings for their sites changed in IIS. Although it isn’t a complicated change, it is different to the older versions of IIS and can be confusing. Here’s how we did it!

If you’re anything like me then you probably find that over the course of a working day you end up with lots of remote desktop sessions open to various servers. Sometimes it’s tricky to remember which box you’re looking at, and that’s where BGInfo from Sysinternals/Microsoft comes in. It’s a small application that generates a bitmap wallpaper when you login, showing a number of useful things about the system such as IP address, hostname, disk info – there are lots of different options to choose from. I find it really useful, and what’s more it doesn’t have much of a hit on your machine as it only runs when you logon.