My Sharepoint Musings

So there was a mix up to day on the Sharepoint site, apparently a test version of a MAJOR website was being worked on and went "poof". No biggy right? thats what backups are for. Unless the person who set up the backup used his username in the auth part of it and has since left the company. Thats right, since he left we haven't been backing up the sharepoint sites, any of them. Scarry stuff. Lession learned: Look not just at your web-front and your moss server, but your sql back up server's event logs. And DO NOT, repeat, DO NOT use your personal account when setting up mission-critical processes!

So a user of mine tried to edit a page in our massive collection of sites that document software applications and their use. When they went to (in editing mode) Page -> Page setting they got the following in their face: Error returned: User Not Found Source of problem: My predecessor had a search problem after he migrated users over to the MOSS 2007 server. A few users had the same GUID as each other, even tho they are suppose to be unique. So his solution was to delete the offending user out of the database manually... And that is how i got my problem. Parts of the sharepoint sites pull from the tp_ID feild and reference that. Others reference tp_GUID. This page uses tp_ID to pull the information it needs to generate the settings page. My hack-solution: This is unsupported by microsoft, note that i only did this as a temporay measure. I created, manually, a fake user in the database that used the same tp_ID as the one he deleted a while ago.. yes i had to do some annoying sql to ge

So my problem was i wanted to enable the Site Directory on the old WSS 2.0 page i migrated over, and no matter how many features i enabled on the page, it just would not allow me to create a SiteDriectory template page, even if i forced the issue with sharepoint designer. Silly me, solution is right in the Central Administration: Central Admin -> Operations -> Upgrade and Migration -> Enable features on existing sites. Yes even tho i told it to use the enterprise feature set, it could not do so unless i performed this step first..

Well there is a slight delay on some of my documentation about converting from 2.0 to 3.0. I am still in the process of documenting the process for the company, once that is finished i will do a quick conversion and put what i have up here for all to see. What i'd like to comment on is the domain\username to newdomain\username migration process which, in my case, needs to happen every time i convert another website from 2.0 to 3.0. During our migration process of moving WSS 2.0 to WSS 3.0 websites, i ran into a problem with the old server not being configured correctly. More to the point the server's user lists were not connected to our Active Directory. It was all done localy (yes, each user added to the local machine, and then added to the WSS 2.0 site). This was one of the driving factors behind why the company is converting over to MOSS servers. However, this brought up a problem for me as i converted the websites. How do i maintain username permissions but make everyone us

So i just started my new job as my company's "sharepoint guru" which so far involves administration, supporting, designing, redesigning of all of their sharepoint sites and infopath forms... which happens to span 3 different versions of sharepoint right now. You heard me right, from STS to MOSS, they have sites running on them all, and the plan is to have me negotate, migrate, and set up all of the old systems to play nice on MOSS. This is about when i should mention that i dont have previous sharepoint experince, or infopath. I do have a decade+ of webdevelopment experince as a part-time thing, but i have always stayed an arms length from microsoft products. And i am really starting to understand why as i start this long journey. As i fumble and trip my way through sharepoint administration and yes, migration, i will update this blog in hopes that people who run into the same head-against-wall moments i have had allready, can side step them, and keep moving forward. My