Author: givenscj

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How to Recreate your Central Administration Web

I'm sure a lot of you have done this one before:

Moved all sharepoint databases from one db server to another, probably in the process of upgrading from SQL 2005 to SQL 2008 right?  Then you realize that you have now lost your central administration site and really have no idea how to get it back so you can change the location of the databases?  Yeah…I did it this weekend too.

Luckily, you can run the following command to get your central administraiton site service running on a web front end:

stsadm.exe -o provisionservice -action start -servicetype
Microsoft.SharePoint.Administration.SPWebService -servicename
WSS_Administration

Another way of doing it is to remove the web server from the farm, then add it back, selecting the advanced option to make it host the CA web application

This made me very happy that I didn't not have to recreate my Farm simply for the lack of a front end web to change things!

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Deleting Long File Paths

I was installing MacOS Leopard a few weeks ago and ended up unzipping the HFS file system DVD to my desktop.  It created a file path the likes I have never seen!  In order to get rid of it I couldn't simply click the "delete" button without getting an error about the file path.  reminded me of the times of FTP tagging!  I fould this nice articule to delete long file paths:

 http://support.microsoft.com/kb/320081

Hope this helps some of you!

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Calculating distance between two Points – GPS

It's a crazy long algorithm, but it works…in C#:  A and B are point classes.

Math.Cos(Math.Sin((A.Latitude * Math.PI / 180)) * Math.Sin((B.Latitude * Math.PI / 180)) + Math.Cos((A.Latitude * Math.PI / 180)) * Math.Cos((B.Latitude * Math.PI / 180)) * Math.Cos(((A.Longitude – B.Longitude) * Math.PI / 180)))) * 180 / Math.PI) * 60 * 1.1515)

I use it in my platform when determining closest user and if a person is at an event.

Chris

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MCT Virtual Summit Presentation and SharePoint Sales Guide

I did my Virtual Summit last night…was perfectly timed to the second!  I have attached the powerpoints and sales guide from the presentation.

I basically talk about the various different courses that you can take around SharePoint and what is offered in the MS Courseware Library… a lot of the ACS courses are on the top of the lists.

Enjoy!
Chris

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SharePoint 2007 Governance Course

Governance seems to come up in spurts around the community.  This course has been around for a while and really drives a lot of the issues with implementing SharePoint 2007 and addresses issues that you will run into 2 years down the road with your SharePoint 2007 install.

Not a course for Developers or End Users, it is targeted at IT Manager and CIO/CTO level individuals.

The outline is available here (and attached to this blog as a word document):

http://www.architectingconnectedsystems.com/course.aspx?courseid=30

If you want to purchase a copy, send me an email and mention my blog and I'll take $25 off!  First 5 people to email get it for FREE!
Chris

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Extending System Partitions – the best way

As I found out in detail yesterday, extending the system partition of a hard drive is not an easy thing to do!  There is a ton of products out there and frankly…none of them seem worth the hassle or price!  So I wanted to find a cheap( $0 ) way of doing this.  It seems that Windows Server has this lovely diskpart.exe tool.  Only thing is, you can't run it on the server you want to "extend".  Therefore you have to run it from another server with the drives attached.  Now, some of you may not have an all virtual environment like mine, so, you can easily migrate your drives with WinImage.  it will create a VPC of your hard drive, then you can "burn" the VPC image to another drive! 

What I found out about windows server 2003, it's not so happy with the diskpart command and extending other system volumes.  So I tried Server 2008, it worked like a charm!  Now I have a 16GB system partition extended to 100GB.  Awesome!

Hope that helps people!
Chris

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SharePoint Site/List/Item Effective Permission Finder!

This is amazing, I was simply trying to figure out what the SharePoint Designer (Site->Contributor Settings) would do to permissions in the database.  So, I built this entire application to do it, but then realized after I got it built that SPDesigner simply creates a file in the _contributor_settings directory in the content database and doesn't tough anything else. DOH!  

This tool will find the effective permission for an object in a site.  It uses a combination of object model (to get the siteid) and direct calls to the content database (rather than slow object model).  This tool must be run by an administrator on a SP box in the farm.  I went ahead and added in my "Find empty permission objects" code too.

Oh, and by the way, there is a column called PermMaskDeny in the Roles table.  Even though SharePoint doesn't have a front end UI or object model deny mechanism…it seems they are thinking ahead to be able to implement explicit "deny" in SharePoint!  Maybe in 2010?  I did try setting it to something (all 1s), but it didn't do anything 🙁  Oh well…

Enjoy!
Chris

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Customizing SharePoint Approval Workflow – Step by Step

I like challenges and I was posed this one today in class.  Change the built in approval workflow to add steps!  Since I have written a really Advanced Workflow course and know a few things that most people don't about workflows in general, I decided to take on the challenge on the plane ride back to San Diego from Houston.

Attached is the results of my exploits.  Using the WorkflowChanges class, I was able to inject a new activity into the workflow.  I was also able to change the InfoPath form that drive the approval workflow.  The only thing I didn't do was to actually take a new element value out of the modified form.  I have left that for someone else to figure out!

 If you are using FireFox, right click the file and select download…

Enjoy!
Chris