Sudev Gandhi

It is rare for a technology product to attract as much attention as SharePoint has in recent years. The industry has historically paid little attention to new product suites, particularly those related to web design. SharePoint products and technologies, however, have managed to excite and rejuvenate industry followers, causing them to take notice of the ease of use, scalability, flexibility, and powerful document management capabilities within the product. A number of organizational needs have spurred the adoption of SharePoint technologies. Some of the most commonly mentioned requirements include the following: A need for better document management than the file system can offer —This includes document versioning, check-out and check-in features, adding metadata to documents, and better control of document access (by using groups and granular security). The high-level need is simply to make it easier for users to find the latest version of the document or documents they need to do th...

I’d like to share a typical problem recently I faced with WSS 3.0 configuration on a Windows 2003 Server. I created a virtual machine with Windows 2003 OS and named it “ myvpc ” in a hypothetical workgroup viz. “ WKGP ” (I initially planned to use it in stand-alone mode). Then I installed all available updates to the Windows Server and .Net framework 3.5 with IIS followed by Stand-alone installation of Latest WSS 3.0. The default team site and central administration site were working smooth. I even created another application using central administration. Later I changed my mind and thought that it would be better if I include this virtual machine into our company’s local intranet Domain. At this point of time I had to change the PC name from “ myvpc ” to “ SUDEV-VPC ” due to some or other reasons. Now, suddenly none of the SharePoint sites were accessible even from the “ localhost “! I opened IIS console and noticed that “SharePoint Admin” site was stopped!!! I checked the systems log...

Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 can, working with other components of the Microsoft Office 2007 suite of applications, provide the functionality and benefits described previously. However, the amount of functionality derived from an MOSS installation depends on the features implemented and activated, as well as whether or not the MOSS environment is used to extend other building blocks, such as WSS and SQL Server. Figure 1 illustrates the structure of a complete MOSS environment. MOSS provides much of the functionality, but that functionality can be enhanced by the inclusion of other extended capability systems. The MOSS Common Framework MOSS 2007 supports other server-based applications and services with a set of common administrative services, as shown in Figure 2. The primary elements in the common group of services are (as shown in Figure 2, left to right): Collaboration This service supports discussions and shared task lists on server-based portals and determines the statu...

SQL Server Reporting Services, due to its robust but user friendly architecture, is an obvious choice for Enterprise or in-house reporting, for product management, sales, and human resource and finance departments. Its flexibility makes it an ideal for usage in applications as well (Deliver User-Friendly Reports from Your Application with SQL Server Reporting Services - MSDN Magazine August 2004). Reporting Services offer various delivery methods, from ftp to email and it provides various rendering formats therefore it makes adds easiness to business to business reporting. Similarly because of its flexibility and industry standard security model, it makes extranet and secure internet reporting easily achievable. The reporting system comprises for following main components. Report Server & Report Server Database Report Server is an integrated web service which controls report generation and management. Report Server database is a SQL server database which is used as data dictionary ...

In previous versions of SharePoint (or other platforms), if you had some task you wanted to perform on a scheduled basis, you'd have to either create a console EXE and schedule it to run via Windows Task Scheduler (ala AT.EXE) or create a Windows Service that went to sleep for a period of time. In order to install (and maintain) these tasks, you had to have console access to your production SharePoint (or other app) servers... something IT or admins wouldn't easily hand out. Addressing this issue, Microsoft has added something called timer jobs to Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007. Microsoft uses timer jobs to do things like dead web cleanup (purging unused sites from site collections) among others. To see what other timer jobs are out there, from Central Administration , click Operations and then Timer Job Definitions . Not only does Microsoft use timer jobs in MOSS, but you can create your own custom timer jobs to do your own scheduled tasks. What's nice a...