NLB (Network Load Balancing) and SharePoint... Troubleshooting and Configuration tips.

For those of you who have had issues with NLB (Network Load Balancing) and SharePoint, I would recommend you read this article.

http://blogs.msdn.com/joelo/archive/2007/01/05/nlb-network-load-balancing-and-sharepoint-troubleshooting-and-configuration-tips.aspx

It's helped me out with NLB and SharePoint.

Classic Office 2003 menus for Office 2007

If you know anyone who hasn't got used to the ribbon in Office 2007 yet then this is for them. This add-in for Office 2007 gives you a new 'Menu' ribbon which contains all the standard Office 2003 menus and toolbars.

You can download it from Addintools

Changing Authentication Modes

I had a client who accidentally chose Kerberos instead of NTLM and wanted to change it. It's pretty basic.

Go into Central Admin, then Application Management, and then click "Authentication providers".

Then simply choose the web application you want to change, and click on the specific zone you are after modifying.

From there, simply choose the authentication mode from "IIS Authentication Settings" that you are after.

You can also go to a command prompt and change it by using stsadm -o authentication -url -type but that's mostly used to change from basic to integrated authentication.

Add/remove a shared assembly to/from the .NET GAC

Each computer that .NET is installed on has a Global Assembly Cache (GAC) located in the Assembly folder in the Windows directory (usually: C:\WinNT\Assembly). The GAC contains information about shared assemblies which are components that can be shared among several applications (Ex. a DLL).

Shared assemblies must have globally unique names derived from their strong names (public keys generated to distinguish assemblies from other assemblies that may have the same names) which is Microsoft's solution to DLL hell. The GAC, not the registry, is the store for this information. When an application loads the GAC is examined by the Common Language Runtime to determine if the version of a shared component exists that is compatible with the one referenced by the application.

The gacutil.exe that ships with .NET can be used to add or remove a shared assembly from the GAC.

To add a shared assembly, from the command line enter:

gacutil.exe /i myassembly.dll

To remove a shared assembly, from the command line enter:

gacutil.exe /u myassembly.dll

When viewing the GAC in Windows Explorer shfusion.dll is used to provide the user interface. You can locate and rename this DLL to view the GAC like any other folder.

To setup SSL on multiple Sharepoint 2007 web applications using host headers under IIS 6.0

I am frequently required to setup several web applications on my development box and for convenience almost without fail will use host headers to distinguish between them rather than configure and maintain multiple IPs.

This approach serves well until secure http is required and I need to assign SSL certificates to my web applications.

If you have ever tried this you will know that the IIS Manager does not have anywhere to allow you to specify a host header when configuring the SSL for the web application.

The solution I use goes as follows:

1) Install the IIS Resource Kit for IIS 6.0 - it comes packaged with a selfssl utility to generate self-signed certificates. (Of course, feel free to generate them with Perl scripts or any other method since they are not from trusted sources they're only useful for dev and testing purposes anyways.)

2) Create/extend the required web applications using the Administration interface of MOSS (ensuring to select 'Use SSL').

3) Use the selfssl utility to generate and assign a certificate to the first of your web applications as follows:

selfssl /N:CN=*.mydomain.com /K:1024 /V:3650 /S: /P:443

This will generate a 3650 day certificate with a 1024 bit key and assign it to the web application with the site id supplied.

4) Use IIS Manager to assign the same certificate to the other web applications.

5) If you restart IIS at this point only 1 of your sites will actually start - you still need to manually configure the secure bindings for the remaining sites:

cscript.exe C:\Inetpub\AdminScripts\adsutil.vbs set /w3svc//SecureBindings ":443:"

This will set the secure bindings for the site identified on the supplied host header.

6) If you wish you can also now configure the web applications in IIS Manager to require SSL.

7) iisreset and you're done....

Reporting Services not showing up in SharePoint Central Administration 2007

Several people have installed Reporting Services 2005 sp2, SharePoint 2007 and the RS Add-In for SharePoint. After configuring it, they realise that Reporting Services does not showing up in SharePoint Central Administration.

After carefully examing the system, and checking that it's all configured properply, I asked the simple question "did you use the same account to install the RS Add-In as you did to install Sharepoint?". I got a dumb look by the person I asked and they said "should it matter?".

The answer to that is in theory it shouldn't matter. Although in the Central Admin, the links weren't there, RS seems to be there and you could activate it as a Site Feature. But even if you activate it, it won't work as it hasn't been configured from Central Admin. So even though "in theory" it should work, it doesn't.

The easiest way to fix this is to un-install RS Add-in, log in to the server using the same account you used to install sharepoint, then re-install RS Add-in.

How To Add a New Managed Path to Windows SharePoint Services

If you have used WSS and SPS before, then you have probaby created a "Team Site" or something under the "sites" folder. When you do that you get a URL like this:

http://myportal/sites/myteamsite

But what if you want something different, like?

http://myportal/teamsites/myteamsite

It turns out this is fairly simple. To get started, open Windows SharePoint Services Central Admin. In the "Virtual Server Configuration" section click the "Configure virtual server settings" link. In the virtual server list, click the server that you want to configure. (Most people only have "Default Web Site" here.)

Now you are on the "Virtual Server Settings" page. In the section called "Virtual Server Management", click on "Define managed paths".

You should see this screen:

Scroll down to the bottom of the screen to the "Add a New Path" section and type "/teamsites".Click OK and you are done. You should now be able to create sites under /teamsites (or whatever other path you defined.)

Working offline is easy with Outlook 2007

It is possible to have your work with you when you are offline or have a slow connection to the SharePoint site. Often times it is faster to work with a local copy of a document rather than editing directly on the server. This is the case when using a dial-up connection or when network latency is a known issue.

Outlook 2007 make this procedure easy. You can check out the documents that you will be working on and copy them to your local disk. When you are ready to return the documents to the library, simply connect back to the server and check the content in. The following instructions are provided below from Microsoft Office Help.

This option is available for document libraries only.
1. If the library is not already open, click its name on the Quick Launch.
If the name of your library does not appear, click View All Site Content, and then click the name of your library.

2. Point to a file name in the library to display a down arrow.

3. Click the down arrow, and then click Check Out.

4. In the dialog box, select the Use my local drafts folder check box.

Note If you are checking out a file that was created by a program that isn't compatible with Windows SharePoint Services 3.0, the Use my local drafts folder check box does not appear, and you cannot work with the file offline.

5. Edit the file, and then check the file back in when you finish.

Welcome to my new blog. In here I hope to put some of the problems and possible solutions I've faced while developing in Sharepoint 07. Please email me if you have any questions or problems you've had and Ill try my hardest to solve them for you.