You may have had questions or have had others ask you:

Does a WSP deploy perform an IISRESET?
We are upgrading a solution, will it cause an outage?
What causes an outage when working with SharePoint WSP files?

Over the years, I have had many discussions / meetings with clients & colleagues about this and I would like to publish my findings and the links that I have had with me for a while. Let’s clarify this ambiguity:

Here are answers straight up in three scenarios:
Deploying a solution
Do you need to prepare for an outage / IISRESET?: Yes

Retracting a solution

Do you need to prepare for an outage / IISRESET?: Yes

Upgrading a solution

Do you need to prepare for an outage / IISRESET?: Yes

Ok, lets take a closer look:
Deploying a solution
Initially, the package manifest.xml is checked for its content & destination locations. The files specified in the manifest.xml are copied to the locations. After solution files are copied to the target servers, a configuration reset is scheduled for all front-end Web servers; the reset then deploys the files and restarts Microsoft Internet Information Services (IIS). Farm administrators can specify when this occurs (a timer job).
Reference: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa544500.aspx

Retracting a solution

On each front-end Web server, the following occurs:

- Internet Information Services (IIS) is disabled.
- Files are removed from the system.
- IIS is re-enabled and Microsoft SharePoint Foundation is reloaded when a user browses to a page.

- Farm administrators can specify the time when the retraction takes place.

Reference: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa543958.aspx

Upgrading a solution

There are two ways to do an upgrade of a solution. i.e. Replacement and Update. Both inolve a an IISRESET.

Replacements are essentially a retract and optionally removal of a WSP. Then the new version is added and deployed. Causing an IISRESET (twice!).
Updates are essentially a deployment with the same file name but different GUID. SharePoint detects this and retracts the old solution and deploys the new one..causing an IISRESET.

Reference: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa543659.aspx

Please note that there is a -local option when deploying a solution, but according to MSDN, this is to be used for troubleshooting purposes.
Reference: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/microsoft.sharepoint.administration.spsolution.deploylocal.aspx

When you are installing MOSS SharePoint 2007  on a Windows 2008 R2 server, you may receive an error to look up Microsoft KB 962935

The possible cause is because you are installing MOSS2007 with SP 1 on a Windows 2008 R2 server.

To overcome this, you have two options:

1. Slip stream – extract and update your install with MOSS 2007 SP 2
- Extract OfficeServerwithSP1.exe by executing  “OfficeServerwithSP1.exe /extract:C:\MOSS\”
- Extract officeserver2007sp2-kb953334-x64-fullfile-en-us by executing  “officeserver2007sp2-kb953334-x64-fullfile-en-us /extract:C:\MOSSsp2\”
- Copying all files from “C:\MOSSsp2\” to “C:\MOSS\Updates\”

2. Download MOSS 2007 with SP2
- For 32bit
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=2E6E5A9C-EBF6-4F7F-8467-F4DE6BD6B831&displaylang=en

- For 64bit
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=3015FDE4-85F6-4CBC-812D-55701FBFB563&displaylang=en

When creating a new web application, you may experience this error:

The directory C:\Inetpub\wwwroot\wss\VirtualDirectories\80 is already being used by another IIS Web Site.  Choose a different root directory for your new Web application.

Solution:
1. Ensure you have a proper dns name / entry in the hosts file of your server for the new url you are wanting to create.
2. Ensure you have typed in the ‘host header’ typed in when creating the new web application.
3. If this doesnt work, open IIS Manager – Start>run> inetmgr> and verify the home directory – it could be located on a different drive.

You may sometimes see this error when creating a new page in a SharePoint MOSS 2007 publishing portal.

“Content type ’0x01010007FF3E057FA8AB4AA42FCB67B453FFC100E214EEE741181F4E9F7ACC43278EE811′ not found in web ‘http://yoururl’

Two step solution:

1. Go to Central Admin, Application Management, User Permissions for Web Application.
Ensure “Use Client Integration Features” and “Use Remote Interfaces” are enabled.

2. Go to Central Admin, Application Management, Policy for Web Application.
Add your user account with Full Control and Finish!

You may have to do an IISRESET and you should be able to create new pages.

Are you stsadm hungry? I have attended many SharePoint presentations, technical talks, web casts and promotions and only a very few have discussed on whats ‘under the bonnet’ in SharePoint. Probably now is the time for us to dig deeper into the behind-the-scenes, more powerful SharePoint that Administrators and Developers need to be very familiar with.

In this article from Microsoft, it lists all of the stsadm commands available out of the box.

There are two categories – Operations commands and Properties commands.

Operation Commands consist of:
Backup and Restore
Database
Enterprise Content Management
Excel Calculation Services
Features and Solutions
Forms Services
General
Import and Export
Installation
Logging and Events
Search
Security
Shared Services Provider (SSP)
Site Management
Upgrade and Migration
Workflow Management

Properties commands consist of:
Alerts
Antivirus
Data Retrieval Services
General
Information Rights Management
People Picker
Recycle Bin
Site Use Confirmation and Automatic Deletion
Timer Job
Usage Analysis
Workflow

To use an interactive Silverlight application to learn about the commands available, see Stsadm Silverlight application (http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=154235).

Stsadm is located at the following path on the drive where SharePoint Products and Technologies is installed: %COMMONPROGRAMFILES%\microsoft shared\web server extensions\12\bin. You must be an administrator on the local computer to use Stsadm.

Using Stsadm
The command-line tool provides access to the complete set of Office SharePoint Server 2007 operations. You can use Stsadm from the command line or with batch files or scripts. Stsadm must be run on the server itself.

To use Stsadm, you must be a member of the local Administrators group on the server. When you invoke Stsadm, you supply an operation and a set of command-line parameters in the form:

-operation OperationName -parameter value

Read the stsadm command index here:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-au/library/cc263384.aspx

In this article.. learn how to maintain your SharePoint database (best practices).

Once you have won all your SharePoint battles, its no time for relaxing.. its time for your next task!
Have you wondered what are some of the ways you could ‘make’ SharePoint go faster? Are you confident to say that your SharePoint databases are at an optimum? The database administrators I have worked with stay far away from SharePoint databases. This time, I got on to the task myself..

Some of the ways you can optimize your database are:
Defragmentation of the SharePoint database
Defragmenting indexes – This is more beneficial to do indexes rather than tables for database performance.
Shrink Database and log files

As a SharePoint Admin, you need to learn to measure the fragmentation in a SharePoint Database.

You will need to create maintenance plans for SharePoint database. Some maintenance plan best practices are:

• Check database integrity
• Shrink DatabaseReorganize Index
• Rebuild Index
• Maintenance Cleanup task

For step by step instructions, download them here (docx file from Microsoft):
http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=111531&clcid=0×409

Are you wanting to know what SharePoint 2010 looks like? I was thrilled to see the changes in SharePoint 2010.

There are three videos from Microsoft, which has sneak peak of SharePoint 2010. Its quite a good tour of SharePoint 2010.
You will get to see Central Administration, Best Practices Analyzer, Developer Tools, Visual 2010 SharePoint tools, the new “Ribbon” and much more!

SharePoint 2010 Central Admin 1

The first video is an Overview by Tom Rizzo, Senior Director, SharePoint
The second video is for IT Professionals by Richard Riley, Technical Product Manager
The third video is for Developers by Paul Andrew, Technical Product Manager

I appreciate any comments..

Click here to watch the videos

http://sharepoint.microsoft.com/2010/Sneak_Peek/Pages/default.aspx

Microsoft will ship the new SharePoint 2010 along with Office 2010 in the first half of next year (Beta – late 2009).
There has been a few questions about the name of SharePoint 2010.
Basically, we presently have three SharePoint server versions:
1. Windows SharePoint Services
2. Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 Standard
3. Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 Enterprise

From now onwards it will be just Microsoft SharePoint 2010 (without the “office”).

There has been a few name changes to SharePoint in previous years, but I wont go into that now.

Some of the main systems requirements are:
1. Requires 64bit Microsoft Windows 2008 or 64bit Microsoft Windows 2008 R2

2. This implies it requires 64 bit hardware on its environment
3. No support for Internet Explorer 6 anymore – only IE 7 and above (XHTML 1.0 compliant)
4. SQL 2005 and SQL 2008 on 64 bit

Some of the features are:

Better support for Internet facing sites
More security features & flexibility in managing permissions
Email management for users
Faster search
More storage options such as SAN, NAS, RAID etc. (currently only SQL)
Improved taxonomy management

Better Dashboards and reports
Records and archiving policies
Easy to use templates
More commands
Microsoft Groove is renamed as ‘SharePoint Workspace Manager’
Integration with other CMS products
Improved infopath form capabilities
More workflow types
Native support for Mozilla Firefox 3.0 and Opera
Better support for Mobile devices
Easy migration from SPS2003 and MOSS 2007
Snapshot backup and recovery
Granular recovery at item level

In time, I will discuss migration strategies and planning your new SharePoint 2010 upgrade.
Keep updated and bookmark my site!

Change your existing host header in SharePoint ( WSS or MOSS 2007 )

Do you want to publish your SharePoint intranet or internet site to your users with a nice friendly url (or hostheader)?

This article can be also used if you want to rename your web application.

You would have to change the Alternate Access Mappings in SharePoint.

In SharePoint Central Administration, Click Operations.
In Operations, under the Global Configuration area, click Alternate access mappings

Next to Alternate Access Mapping Collection, click on the down arrow and click on ‘Change Alternate Access Mapping Collection’.

Select your Web Application

Click on Edit Public URLs

Then type in your desired URL (hostheader) in the Internet field as shown below:
For Example: http://www.mysite.com

Alternatively, you can change the Intranet fields for SharePoint intranet deployments.

Click Save and youre done!

But before you go, make sure your DNS resolves to your web server IP address. Ping and make sure that works. You could also modify your hosts file to test this out.

You have now successfully enabled SharePoint to resolve requests to your new URL.

When installing SharePoint 2007 (MOSS 2007) or WSS 3.0  from the SharePoint Products and Technologies Configuration Wizard, you may ask, ‘what do I do if I want to connect SharePoint using SQL authentication, rather than Microsoft’s Active Directory?’
You may want to connect SharePoint to its configuration database using a locked down SQL user account to isolate your front end website from Active Directory.

Using the SharePoint Products and Technologies Configuration Wizard, it may appear to be impossible to get past the DOMAIN\User_Name as required in the wizard.

If you havent installed SharePoint yet, then you should not select to open the configuration wizard.
You need to just click ‘close’.

If you have installed SharePoint and not yet run the configuration Wizard, then you will see this message when you click on Central Administration.
See example:

Now to connect specify an SQL account instead of a DOMAIN\User_Name account, you would have to close the Wizard and perform the following steps:

Manually create four databases in your SQL server with the following settings:
Database Name: (see examples below)
Collation: Latin1_General_CI_AS_KS_WS

Database Name examples:
SharePoint_Config (SharePoint Configuration)
SharePoint_AdminContent (SharePoint Admin Contents)
SharePoint_SSP_DB (Shared Services)
SharePoint_SSP_Search_DB (Shared Services Search)

(Note: SSP – Shared Services Provider)

Create your SQL user account and assign permissions as dbo on the above databases

Now search for a file called PSConfig.exe
It should be found in:
C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\12\BIN

Open a command prompt and go to the directory where the PSConfig.exe file resides.

Ready for the fun stuff?
Run this command to create your new SharePoint farm and connect it via a SQL account.

PSConfig -cmd configdb -create -server (Database server name) -database (Database name) -user (Farm Administrators domain account) –password (Farm Administrators password) -dbuser (Newly created SQL username) –dbpassword (SQL password) –admincontentdatabase (Admin Content Database name)

You should see a success message. If not, then I would suggest you to recheck your SQL permissions and Farm Administrators permissions. PSConfig will spit out other errors if its anything else.

PSConfig arguments explained:

create: Creates a new configuration database and thus establishes a new server farm. If this server is already connected to a configuration database, the server will be disconnected first, then the new configuration database will be created.

server: The SQL server where the configuration database is located.
database: The configuration database name.
dbuser: The SQL server user name used for SQL authentication.
dbpassword: The SQL server password used for SQL authentication.
user: Server farm administrator user account.
password: Server farm administrator user account password.
admincontentdatabase: The Central Administration Web Application content database name.

You would have to resume the Configuration Wizard.
Go to Start > All Programs > Microsoft Office Server > SharePoint configuration Wizard. The wizard should have detected that the configuration database has already been created.

Don’t disconnect from the server farm, unless you want to recreate the database again.

You should now use your SQL Authentication to any other databases you want to configure such as the SSP and the Search Database.

To add more servers such as Web Front End servers to the SharePoint farm, then you have to go through all the above steps, except run this PSConfig command from the command prompt:

PSConfig -cmd configdb -connect -server (Database server name) -database (Database name) -user (Farm Administrators domain account) –password (Farm Administrators password) -dbuser (Newly created SQL username) –dbpassword (SQL password) –admincontentdatabase (Admin Content Database name)

Argument explained:
connect: Connects to an existing configuration database and thus joins this server to an existing server farm. If this server is already connected to a configuration database, the server will be disconnected first, then connected to the existing configuration database.

And youre done! You now have a SharePoint farm running off SQL logins.

*Please note: Some visitors were confused as they thought it worked for SharePoint 2010. This post is not for SharePoint 2010. You can tell by the 12 hive path. This post dates back way before SharePoint 2010 beta was out.