Open Abstracts

SharePoint Newbie Issue #2

Deployed SharePoint Server 2007 on two different boxes running on farm environments and ran into permission issues. One was involving domain controllers and the other was thanks to “the always buggy” IE. However, one important thing I’ve learned is planning your deployment well ahead. One of the prime issues in the planning should be service accounts.

I was constantly told by multiple developers that the farm accounts required local admin access in the box your installing SharePoint. However, I came to realize this was not the case, at least in SP2. Having said that, all you need to know is that you’ve gotta well organized AD setup and running and the service account created and ready to go. Microsoft has a TechNet article on planning for service accounts which is quite lengthy and confusing. Here’s a more summarized and easy to understand version. READ IT! You’re gonna thank me and the writer later on!

http://cregan.wordpress.com/2006/12/08/moss-setup-service-accounts/

SharePoint Newbie Issue #1

While running a few virtual machines with Windows Server 2008 I realized that I have been running into a few problems, especially with SharePoint and Office integration. If you are trying to create documents in any Office suite application or any other document for that matter which needs to be save in a SharePoint library and run into the following error,

Path does not exist. Check the path and try again.

its likely that you need to enable WebDav extensions in your Web Server.

Download the correct extensions package for your server architecture and follow the instructions in this page to install WebDav extensions.

http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=108052

Twitter now allows creating Lists that allow tweeters to build their own timelines consisting selected groups of followers. Pretty sweet, specially when you want to have a twitcussion among a certain few. It’s currently on BETA testing, so If you don’t see it yet be patient. It will tweet your way through.

Looks like I’m getting more and more into tweaking than speaking. Oh, btw, they only said not to tweet about it. I guess blogging is ok!

Being new to this whole Sharepoint world and not being a big fan of M$ products, it has been some what of a challenging task to get Sharepoint deployed and running. A basic setup for a development environment had no issues what so ever. However, getting it done for a MOSS farm with SQL Server 2008 on a 2008 RC Server running on VMWare is more like trying to get a bunch of monkeys to work together!

After a few days of playing around, installing and uninstalling pretty much everything under the sun, I still seem to run into permission issues with Domain and Local Admins for service accounts. On top of that, having to re-do everything times how ever many service packs MS has released has definitely not made things easy. This is why I love the simple way of things in the open source world!

Having said that, this article on installing MOSS 2007 with the rest of the bandits came in very handy and might be something to look at if you are trying to take on this job for the first time!

So Twitter has been down for a while now. Facebook was throwing empty pages yesterday. Make’s one think how ready Cloud Computing really is. I know it’s been all over that Cloud applications are to encounter more frequent but less disruptive service outages, but what does this really mean? Saving a buck out of recovery or maintainence costs?

I’m by no means an expert in the subject but got enough brains to realize “downtime” is BAD. Now it’s not to say that it’s not expected as in all application delivery streams, but it’s definitely not something that’s favorable to anyone providing or using such services either.

I look forward to seeing what’s going to come out of the Cloud Computing World Forum and the Cloud Computing Expo in the next couple of weeks.