dwinter's [MSFT] WebLog : Product Support

August Cumulative Update guidance provided

dwinter — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 00:16:00 GMT

The SharePoint Product Group has provided us with some further guidance on what is currently needed to build a server up so that it is running the most up-to-date code. To get the details, read:

http://blogs.msdn.com/sharepoint/archive/2008/09/29/announcing-august-cumulative-update-for-office-sharepoint-server-2007-and-windows-sharepoint-services-3-0.aspx

Senior Dan...

dwinter — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 09:11:00 GMT

Some of you may have noticed that in August my title changed to Senior Escalation Engineer. As I look back over the past four years as an Escalation Engineer for SharePoint, I can't say that I disagree... I certainly am old enough in this product to start getting some discounts at lunch :). More seriously though, it is an honor to get this kind of title, and I wanted to point out a few other folks out in the blogosphere from my team that you may also know who also earned this distinction:
Steve Sheppard (author of the WebDav whitepaper and the fantastic series on overlapped recycling configuration of SharePoint)
Mike McIntyre (creator and maintainer of the SPSReports tool that so many of us use to get information about our environments)

There certainly are other quality engineers who I would love to mention here, but as of yet--do not have a presense in the blog-o-sphere, so I'll keep them anonymous at this point. None-the-less, know that with this new title comes some interesting responsibilities where we are enabled to make changes internally in a number of different areas that not only effect SharePoint, but other products as well. So, exciting times, and congrats to Steve and Mike!

SharePoint on virtualization

dwinter — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 17:04:00 GMT

You may have noticed the post on the SharePoint Team blog (http://blogs.msdn.com/sharepoint/archive/2008/08/18/update-on-virtualization-support-for-sharepoint-products-and-technologies.aspx) announcing support for Hyper-V based virtualization. There are however many things to know about the extent of what is supported. Obviously we will be supporting our own Hyper-V solution, but beyond that, we will also be supporting SharePoint running within SVVP certified solutions. As of the time of writing this, we only have one partner that is SVVP certified, Novell, Inc. The list is maintained at http://support.microsoft.com/kb/944987. We do have a number of vendors who are working on becoming certified though, currently:
   Cisco Systems, Inc.
   Citrix Systems, Inc.
   Sun Microsystems
   Unisys Corp.
   Virtual Iron Software
   VMware, Inc.

If things go well, we will see more of these vendors go from one list to the other--which will provide you with more options to suit your needs. None-the-less, this is an exciting time for virtualization and SharePoint, and only paves the way for bigger things.

As I mentioned before, there definitely are some things you should be aware of about running SharePoint in a Hyper-V environment. From a technical perspective there are two large ones. First, you need to be on SP1. There's not much interpretation there--for support and licensing to line up, we are requiring that. The second point is that you cannot take a snapshot of the Hyper-V environment. This largely has to do with how a farm could get out of sync in many areas and not be able to be guaranteed to come back online properly if this was done. In time my hope is that we can change this support stance and allow for more flexibility in this area, but for now, don't snapshot.

Patching Presentation video is now available for download

dwinter — Sun, 27 Jul 2008 20:08:00 GMT

We got the video of my patching presentation posted from the SharePoint 2008 conference. There truely is a lot of great information here, and this download will be referenced from many Microsoft locations as a must see when it comes to patching SharePoint.

Here are the links:

News Story - http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc706878(TechNet.10).aspx

Download Link - http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=121946&clcid=0x409

Enjoy!

AAM issue with Infrastructure Update

dwinter — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 00:18:00 GMT

Please notice that the Infrastructure Update KB has been updated to include the following:

Known issues discovered after release of this update

   Installing the Infrastructure Update in a SharePoint farm that uses Alternate Access Mapping with a
   reverse proxy or a network load balancer, such as in an extranet deployment, may cause some
   public URLs to become unresponsive.

   Microsoft is aware of this issue and is developing a solution. Before installing the Infrastructure Update,
customers who use this configuration should use a test environment to verify that public URLs remain
   accessible after the update is installed.

Major SharePoint 2007 update released...

dwinter — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 01:55:00 GMT

It was just announced over on the SharePoint Team blog:
http://blogs.msdn.com/sharepoint/archive/2008/07/15/announcing-availability-of-infrastructure-updates.aspx

This is an important update and is publically downloadable using the links on the SharePoint team's blog entry. We are recommending that all customers apply these updates. Please schedule a time to test them in your test enviornments, and also time for production upgrades. As with any upgrade, you will need go through an upgrade on all of your content. So the more content you have, the longer it will take. We do recommend that if you have MOSS that you apply both the WSS and MOSS packages and not just WSS or MOSS. The MOSS package (build 6322.5000) contains both the Global and Localized patches for MOSS (you should see 42 MSPs). The WSS package (build 6320.5000) contains only the Global patch (there is 1 MSP). It is recommended that you look to see if you need the latest WSS Localized patches (6309.5000) as well--which at the time of writing this post is: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/953484

Updated statement from Microsoft on custom site definitions

dwinter — Thu, 12 May 2005 17:40:00 GMT

http://support.microsoft.com/Default.aspx?id=898631

Here's the meat, I have highlighted the key points:

Supported scenarios

When you work with custom site definitions or custom area definitions, the following scenarios are supported:

•

To create a custom site definition or a custom area definition, you copy an existing site definition or an existing area definition, and then you rename and modify the new site definition or the new area definition. For more information about this supported method, visit the following Microsoft Web site:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/en-us/spptsdk/html/tsptCustomExistingWebTemplate_SV01017467.asp?frame=true

•

You modify the .xml files and the .aspx files in a custom site definition or in a custom area definition before you create new sites or new portal areas by using the custom site definition or the custom area definition.

•

You deploy the custom site definition or the custom area definition. That is, you create new sites or new portal areas by using the custom site definition or the custom area definition. To modify the new sites or the new portal areas that you created, you use one or more of the following three supported methods:

•	You modify the site or the portal area by using the user interface in SharePoint Portal Server 2003 or in Windows SharePoint Services.
•	You programmatically modify the site or the portal area by using the SharePoint Portal Server object model or the Windows SharePoint Services object model.
•	You modify the site or the portal area by using Microsoft Office FrontPage 2003.

Note These three methods are also supported methods to use if you want to modify the Default.aspx page in the portal site. Microsoft does not support using other methods to modify the Default.aspx page in the portal site.

Unsupported scenarios

When you work with custom site definitions or custom area definitions, the following scenarios are not supported:

•	You modify one of the default site definitions or one of the default area definitions that are included in SharePoint Portal Server 2003 or in Windows SharePoint Services. Microsoft does not support modifying the default set of site definitions or area definitions that are installed when you installed Windows SharePoint Services and SharePoint Portal Server 2003. Additionally, Microsoft does not support modifying the .xml files or the .aspx files in the default site definition or in the default area definition.
•	You modify a custom site definition or a custom area definition after you deploy the custom site definition or the custom area definition. Microsoft does not support modifying a custom site definition or a custom area definition after you create a new site or a new portal area by using that site definition or area definition. Additionally, Microsoft does not support modifying the .xml files or the .aspx files in the custom site definition or in the custom area definition after you deploy the custom site definition or the custom area definition.
•	You modify the Webtemp.xml file or the Webtempsps.xml file that is located in the following folder: Drive:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\60\Template\LCID\XML With one exception, Microsoft does not support modifying the Webtemp.xml file or the Webtempsps.xml file. The exception is the Webtemp.xml file. Microsoft supports modifying the Webtemp.xml file only if you want to hide a specific template. To hide a specific template, you modify the Hidden parameter of that template in the Webtemp.xml file.