Michael O'Donovan's SharePoint and Stuff : MOSS 2007

Most common issue with SharePoint installations – service account misuse

modonovan — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 14:32:29 GMT

It is frightening to see how many SharePoint installations have been installed with wrong service accounts. Either people are using the default domain administrator or local machine administrator for all service accounts, or they are creating a single service account for everything and in many cases giving it WAY too many rights. SharePoint 2007 has been out for a fair amount of time and people are still getting this massively wrong. We can dissect later why that is, but for now I wanted to give my quick overview on what I suggest for service accounts in SharePoint 2007.

Few golden rules:

Never use domain administrator or built-in machine administrator for any SharePoint service account, and never be logged onto a server with as either of these accounts when installing SharePoint.
Never use the same service account for all SharePoint services
Never manually grant SQL Server rights to any service account (except the one you use to install SharePoint – farm service account, will come back to this later). SharePoint will give all SQL Server rights to the appropriate service accounts
Read the installation documentation. This is not a simple installation and configuration, so don’t treat it as such. Do you home-work before installing and configuring a SharePoint farm. Seriously, this is not a file server!

Depending which resources you read, will see suggestions anywhere from 3 to 7 service accounts required for SharePoint Server 2007. In my suggestion below, I recommend 5 service accounts. There are many arguments to be had around details, but I don't believe you will be going wrong with this.

Account	Purpose	Scope	Used By	When do you input this account name?	Rights Required
Farm Account / Central Admin App Pool Account	Used to run setup on each MOSS server in the farm. You must be physically logged on as this user when installing MOSS. This user account must not be the domain or local default “administrator” account, create a new account which you might call “MOSSFarmSVCAccount” and use this across all servers to install MOSS. During installation it will ask for a Farm Account, give it this user account. Used by the SharePoint Central Administration Web App’s application pool to communicate with SQL Server This account is sometimes referred to as the “database access account”	Farm	Person installing MOSS SharePoint Central Admin Application Pool WSS Administration Service	To log onto server to install MOSS During setup its asked for as the “Farm Account”	Member of the local administrators group on each MOSS server. Even though not a domain admin, this account must be a local server admin on each MOSS server. Member of SQL Server Security Administrator and Database Creator rights on SQL Server where databases will be created during setup. Before installing MOSS, make sure this user has these rights in SQL Server. Once done, you will not need to grant access to SQL objects again, SharePoint will do this for you when it get’s configured.
SSP App Pool Identity Account	Used by the SSP Web Application’s application pool to communicate with SQL Server Excel Calculation Services use this account by default to connect to data sources	App	SSP Web Application’s Application Pool Excel Services Service	During SSP creation	No rights or permissions should be explicitly given to this account. In other words, make this a standard domain user account (you might want to set password policies to prevent password expiring etc) SharePoint will automatically grant this account the correct permissions on the databases in SQL. SSP content database = DBO Content DB’s associate to SSP = Read/Write Central Admin content DB = Read Config DB = Read
SSP Service Account	User account for the SSP Web services to use for inter-server communication and for running SSP-scoped timer jobs	Farm	SSP Timer Service SSP Web Services	During SSP creation	No rights or permissions should be explicitly given to this account. In other words, make this a standard domain user account (you might want to set password policies to prevent password expiring etc) SharePoint will automatically grant this account the correct permissions on the databases in SQL. These end up being the same rights and permissions as the SSP App Pool Identity Account
Search Content Access and Profile Import Account	Used by the MOSS search service to read content to index. It is also used by default to access AD to import user account information into the profile database. yes, you can have other accounts which you use to specifically connect to AD for profile import and and various accounts for all your content crawling, but for now I am assuming 1 account for all of these tasks.	SSP	Search Service	Supplied During SSP creation	No rights or permissions should be explicitly given to this account. In other words, make this a standard domain user account (you might want to set password policies to prevent password expiring etc) SharePoint will automatically grant this account the correct permissions on the databases in SQL. This account must NOT be a member of the local administrators group. Well none of the accounts should be (except farm service account), but I really just wanted to call this out here explicitly because it has be known to cause issues with Search. A rule will automatically be created which grants this account read access to all MOSS content
Generic WSS Web Application Pool Identity	I generally recommend having one generic application pool identity (service account) for all the web applications (application pools) you create. Make life easier otherwise you create many accounts for all web applications (application pools). There is also a discussion to be had on how many application pools you need for your web applications, but is a discussion for another day. Used by all WSS web. This account will perform all communication between the web application and the SQL Server databases for those web applications.	App	Web Application Pools	During web application / application pool creation	No rights or permissions should be explicitly given to this account. In other words, make this a standard domain user account (you might want to set password policies to prevent password expiring etc) SharePoint will automatically grant this account the correct permissions on the databases in SQL.

Question: How do I change my already bad deployment? Check this KB article out, which may help http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;934838

I hope this helps in some little way next time you are tasked with this.

Michael

MonteCasino.co.za and TsogoSun.co.za go live on MOSS 2007

modonovan — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 13:35:07 GMT

Both of these web sites (developed by local partner Intervate) have gone live using Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 (MOSS). When you have a chance, hope on over and take a look.

www.montecasino.co.za

www.tsogosun.co.za

Once, again these have been updated on www.informationworker.co.za/pages/showcase.aspx for a complete reference of local SA sites on MOSS.

Durban FIFA World Cup 2010 Host City Web Site Launches on MOSS 2007

modonovan — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 16:13:33 GMT

Featuring Microsoft Silverlight and MOSS 2007, Durban’s official FIFA World Cup Host City web site has launched. Local South African partner AdaptIT has done an excellent job in assembling this great looking web site.

This has been added to the SA showcase of MOSS internet sites.

Michael

Using script.aculo.us with MOSS 2007

modonovan — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 16:26:33 GMT

“script.aculo.us provides you with easy-to-use, cross-browser user interface JavaScript libraries to make your web sites and web applications fly” - http://script.aculo.us/

I was assembling an internal web site on MOSS 2007 and found that script.aculo.us had some funky effects that I wanted to use, so the task was then to see if I could get the javascript libraries and functions to work with my custom master page. More specifically I wanted to have a funky expandable/collapsible “sliding style” headings in my summary link and content query web parts. The image below shows a simple example of a summary links control which has headings (groups), when you click a heading the links in the heading expand and any other heading which is expanded collapses, done using the script.aculo.us slideUp and slideDown functions. Sound easy? Well, a little tricky with script.aculo.us, but doable. Once working, we also have a great framework for using all the other cool functions in the script.aculo.us library.

NB: you should have a good understanding of HTML, javascript, developing custom master pages and styles for content query and summary link web parts for SharePoint to get the most from the steps I outline below. Also, a quick review of script.aculo.us is probably a good idea before commencing. Lastly, this sample is provided “as is”, it works for me, but I have also not done thorough testing on all functions, just the slideUp and slideDown.

Summary of process:

Add script.aculo.us javascript libraries (.js files) to a location which can be referenced from your master page
Add reference to appropriate script.aculo.us libraries in your master page
Edit or add new group style for summary link web part to call the appropriate script function

Step 1:

There are various places where you can place custom javascript files for a custom master page, in my scenario I chose to add them to the “Style Library” folder using SharePoint Designer. Of course, in some descent well thought through folder structure. The image below shows the script.aculo.us javascript files inside my folder structure.

Step 2:

You need to reference the script files being used somewhere in the HTML of your page, in my scenario I added it to the master page HEAD section so that all pages can use the functions in script.aculo.us libraries. Ordinarily this would be a simple step, however there is something that you need to be VERY aware of. The script.aculo.us libraries can break various functions in SharePoint e.g. the HTML Content Editor control. This is because the script.aculo.us libraries override and change the behavior of some default javascript objects e.g. array. To solve this problem, I only render the script.aculo.us script references when the page in not in edit mode, to do this you wrap the references in a SharePoint EditModePanel control with the PageDisplayMode propery set to “Display”, an example is shown below.

<PublishingWebControls:EditModePanel PageDisplayMode="Display" runat=server id="EditModePanel1">
    <script type="text/javascript" language="javascript" src="/sites/sastu/Style Library/stustyles/scripts/prototype.js" />
    <script type="text/javascript" language="javascript" src="/sites/sastu/Style Library/stustyles/scripts/scriptaculous.js" />
</PublishingWebControls:EditModePanel>

However, in my example I also needed a function which would do some work for me to expand and collapse the headings (groups), so in reality my EditModePanel looked like this:

       1: <PublishingWebControls:EditModePanel PageDisplayMode="Display" runat=server id="EditModePanel1">

       2:     <script type="text/javascript" language="javascript" src="/sites/sastu/Style Library/stustyles/scripts/prototype.js" />   1:     2:     <script type="text/javascript" language="javascript" src="/sites/sastu/Style Library/stustyles/scripts/scriptaculous.js" />   3:     <script type="text/javascript" language="javascript">   4:         document.observe("dom:loaded", function() {    5:            6:           var outerSlides = $$('.slideheader');    7:           var slides         = outerSlides.map(function(element) { return element.next() });    8:           var options       =  {duration: 0.25, queue: 'end' };   9:           10:           outerSlides.invoke('observe', 'click', function(event) {   11:             var target = this.next();  12:             slides.each(function(element) {   13:                 if (element.visible() )   14:                 element.slideUp(options);         15:             });   16:           17:             if (!target.visible()){   18:                 target.slideDown(options);  19:                 }   20:           });   21:           22:         });  23:     </script>

       3: </PublishingWebControls:EditModePanel>

Step 3:

The hard work is done, now we need to have our desired elements in the HTML call functions script.aculo.us libraries. In my example, I wanted the effect on the summary links web part group headings. I.e. need a DIV tag around the items within the heading (group) and this DIV must have a specific css class which is used in the the javascript function seen above. This implementation is unique to my specific scenario, of course in your scenario you might call a script.aculo.us function directly from the click, mouseover or any other HTML event directly on your HTML element. In other words, I wanted an output of HTML that looked something like this.

<div id="group" class="slm-layout-main">
    <div class="groupheader item medium slideheader">Local Content</div>
    <div style="display: none"><!--default is hidden-->
        <div id="linkitem" class="item link-item">
            <a href="file://zaiw002/Office%20System%20VPCs" target="_blank" title="Copy of VPCs from Corp">
            Local VPCs</a></div>
        <div id="linkitem" class="item link-item">
            <a href="file://zaiw002/MOSS%20Poc%20Videos" target="_blank" title="Video recordings of POC's completed">
            Videos of POCs</a></div>
        <div id="linkitem" class="item link-item">
            <a href="file://zaiw002/SharePoint%20Conf%20DVD" target="" title="ISO Images of SharePoint Conference DVD">
            SharePoint Conference DVD</a></div>
        <div id="footer">
        </div>
    </div>
</div>

What you will notice is that the DIV with the display set to none is not in any of the default Group styles for the Summary Link web part, and of course the DIV element above that which has the class of slideheader. These were added by creating a new Group style in header.xsl. Note: this article is not supposed to be the end-end guide on editing and adding new styles for summary link web part and content query web part, so you will need to research this yourself if what I am talking about doesn’t make sense. Heather Solomon has some great information on her blog about this)

Here is my template section for my new group called Slider for header.xsl. This adds the display none and slideheader class DIVS.

<xsl:template name="Slider" match="*[@GroupStyle='Slider']" mode="header">
<div class="groupheader item medium slideheader">
  <xsl:call-template name="OuterTemplate.GetGroupName">
    <xsl:with-param name="GroupName" select="@*[name()=$Group]"/>
    <xsl:with-param name="GroupType" select="$GroupType"/>
  </xsl:call-template>
</div>
    <xsl:variable name="begslider">
            <![CDATA[<div style="display:none">]]>
   </xsl:variable>
<xsl:value-of select="$begslider" disable-output-escaping="yes"/> 
<xsl:template>

Of course we also need the closing DIV for the one just opened here, for this I edited contentquerymain.xsl and added a closing DIV if the Slide template was used for the web part, this is done in the CallFooterTemplate template. E.g.

<xsl:template name="OuterTemplate.CallFooterTemplate">
        <xsl:if test="@GroupStyle='Slider'">
         <xsl:variable name="endslider">
                <![CDATA[</div>]]>
           </xsl:variable>
        <xsl:value-of select="$endslider" disable-output-escaping="yes"/>
        </xsl:if>

        <div id="footer">
        </div>
    </xsl:template>

That is it. All I need to do now is add my Summary Links web part and change the group style to Slider. What is great about this is that it doesn’t matter what styles are used for the items inside the Summary Links web part the sliding function will work for the group.

I hope you have managed to follow the steps in this article to get your script.aculo.us functions working. Good luck.

Michael

PPT and Resources from SA MOSS Bootcamp

modonovan — Mon, 10 Nov 2008 13:43:00 GMT

Hi Fellow South African Citizens,

We held a great MOSS bootcamp last week and I promised that I would share the presentations and associated resources from the event. Below are links to presentations from each day, look for the associated resources references in the notes section of each slide.

Day 1
Day 2

For those that attended…thanks for a fantastic 2 days, for those that attended the first day and partied until 5am…hope you have recovered.

Regards,

Michael

Gartner “SharePoint Related” Magic Quadrants Updated for 2008

modonovan — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 16:04:00 GMT

Gartner have released 3 updated Magic Quadrant reports which relate to Microsoft Office SharePoint Server. Specifically they have released the 2008 versions of:

You can find links to the reports at the Analyst Relations section on Microsoft’s web site. Microsoft are in the leaders quadrant for all 3 of these reports. If you have been tracking these over the past years, you will have noticed a consistent move towards the top right hand corner each year. This years results really show the strength of the Microsoft platform in each of these cases, by leaping over many of their traditional competitors in each of these capability areas.

There are a few more to follow shortly, and I expect more great news when those arrive. Watch this space!

Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) proposed standard announced

modonovan — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 19:29:22 GMT

Today, EMC, IBM and Microsoft (along with other leading ECM industry vendors Alfresco, Open Text, Oracle and SAP) announced a jointly developed specification called the Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) specification. CMIS uses Web Services and Web 2.0 interfaces to enable applications to interoperate with multiple Enterprise Content Management (ECM) repositories by different vendors. The companies intend to submit the CMIS specification to OASIS (Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards) for advancement through its rigorous standards development process.

For more information, and to download a preview copy of the CMIS technical specification draft, please see the website of any of the contributing companies: EMC Corporation (www.emc.com/about/news/press/2008/091008-smr-content-management-interoperability-services.htm); IBM (www.ibm.com/software/data/content-management/cm-interoperablity-services.html); and Microsoft (http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=127855).

The SharePoint team have recently posted about this here:

View Video Interview of Jeff Teper Corp VP, Office SharePoint Server Group.

http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/events/cmis/default.mspx

MTN.co.za Launches updated site on MOSS 2007

modonovan — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 16:47:43 GMT

Partner AquaOnline have done a simply stunning job implementing MTN's public internet site on MOSS 2007. The site looks really good and blends in nicely with all their other online solutions. Once again we have added this site to the showcase link on informationworker.co.za.

NewFunds.co.za is hosted on MOSS 2007

modonovan — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 17:48:02 GMT

Microsoft partner IQ Business Group has developed and launched www.newfunds.co.za on MOSS 2007. NewFunds is a joint initiative between Absa Capital and Vunani Capital around Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs). That acronym means the same to me as TCP/IP means to the people who understand ETF's. Anyway, the site looks pretty good.

Citadel launch refreshed internet site on MOSS 2007

modonovan — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 11:03:40 GMT

South African Microsoft partner bSolve has recently launched Citadel's internet facing web site on MOSS 2007. This looks really impressive and this adds to the list of South African public internet sites hosted on MOSS 2007.

The updated list of SA internet web sites on MOSS is below:

Built by AquaOnline

Mutual & Federal - www.mf.co.za
Sun International - www.suninternational.com

Built by 3Fifteen

Their own web site - www.3fifteen.co.za
Absa Capital - www.absacapital.com

Built by i5

Tshwane University of Technology (TUT) - www.tut.ac.za
FreeSATSite Portal - www.freesatsite.co.za

Built by bSolve

Citadel- www.citadel.co.za

Self Built

City of Cape Town - www.capetown.gov.za

Updates for SharePoint Released

modonovan — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 11:01:00 GMT

Yesterday, the SharePoint product team announced the release of important rollup updates for SharePoint Server 2007, Windows SharePoint Services 3.0, Project Server 2007, Search Server 2008, Search Server 2008 Express and Project Professional 2007.

I strongly recommend reading their release announcements, and start planning for the implementation of these ASAP.

Technorati Profile

SharePoint under Hyper-V versus Virtual Server 2005 R2

modonovan — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 13:48:33 GMT

I have done a fair amount of SharePoint demos and developement over the past few years, and have always done this on my laptop using Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 or Microsoft Virtual PC, to host and run a SharePoint environment. Last year at Tech-Ed, while I was doing a demo, I had a comment from someone in the audience "Why is SharePoint so slow?" To some degree it makes sense, the specific SharePoint virtual environment which I was using at the time had almost every product known to man installed (the virtual hard drive size was 40GB), as well as being a domain controller and running on a laptop which only had 1GB ram assigned to the virtual machine. However, with the RTM release of Hyper-V (on Windows Server 2008), I wanted to see if performance was better now.

In other words, if I take the exact same virtual machine running on the exact same hardware, but running under Hyper-V as apposed to Virtual Server 2005, would I have a bettter experience? I have therefore taken some time to execute some simple (but in most cases scientific) tests to determine the difference.

the environment:

Dell D620 laptop with 4GB of RAM and virtual machine on external hard drive (connected via USB)
Dual boot; Windows Vista 32bit with SP1 and Virtual Server 2005 R2 on one partition, and Windows Server 2008 64bit with RTM version of Hyper-V on other partition
Exact same virtual machine and exact same SharePoint application was used in both tests. Obviously in each scenario I had to make sure the appropriate VM additions were installed and running correctly
In each case I assigned the virtual machine 2GB of RAM
The VM disk is 43GB in size, runs Windows Server 2003, SQL Server 2005, MOSS 2007, Visual Studio 2005 Team Edition for Software Testers, is a domain controller and has various other products installed (which are not relevant for now)
Used Visual Studio 2005 Team Edition for Software Testers to perform web load tests, the exact same script was run in each scenario

Important: before digesting the results, it is very important to understand that these results are not intended to give you any idea of what you will expect from a production environment! You would probably never have this configuration in production i.e. so many products on one VM, and running on a laptop. Rather use these figures to give an indication as to the difference between Virtual Server 2005 R2 and Hyper-V, especially in development and demonstration scenarios.

Okay, now for some results. The web test results are based on the standard collaboration portal with a custom master page (just branding changes). The site consists of a wiki, blog, document center, records center (populated with some Excel services based reports), a search center and some team sites. These were populated with about 50mb of data (documents and list items) across the sites. The results are also based on integrated NTLM authentication with no output caching enabled.

Average requests per second

Wow, in most case around 100% improved performance when using Hyper-V. This result is a summary of all page / document requests across the test script, which was executed for 5, 10 and 20 concurrent users with no think time.

Average page (and document get) response time

Yeah baby, once again around 100% faster, and even better than that, 100% faster while serving double the amount of requests!

Specific task response times

Better than 100% improvement in performance when downloading a PowerPoint document (the document is around 1mb in size). And once again, while serving double the amount of requests.

Yikes, executing a search (in search center) is generally around 200% faster under Hyper-V. And once again, while serving double the amount of requests.

Boot-up, save state, restore from saved state response times

Here I just wanted to measure some of my time wasting activities i.e. booting up the virtual machine (boot up time from switching it on until logon screen shows), saving state and restoring from saved state. In each of these scenarios, you can see that Hyper-V will save you time, a couple of minutes in each of my cases.

In summary

When I do demonstrations or development in SharePoint, I will now use Hyper-V. It's one thing having a gut feel that it is faster, but actually getting statistics is really helpful. I could possibly get more performance out of the Hyper-V scenario by assigning the Hyper-V virtual machine more than 2GB of RAM. If I compare each of the scenarios, I can assign more of my laptops 4GB of RAM to the virtual machine using Hyper-V on Windows 2008 over Virtual Server on Vista i.e. Hyper-V on Windows 2008 just gives me more available memory because it doesn't have as many services started by default.

I guess the next step, is to see what the difference is between running MOSS 2007 on Windows Server 2003 and Windows Server 2008...perhaps a future post.

Hope you enjoyed this,

Michael

Podcasting Kit for SharePoint (PKS) Released

modonovan — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 18:28:40 GMT

The Podcasting Kit for SharePoint has been released on CodePlex. All the code is freely available, so download it and evaluate today!

"If you or your organizations are interested in podcasting, have SharePoint Server 2007 deployed and about to develop your own podcasting solution then look no further. PKS will save you time, reduce your risk of developing a solution ground-up, and of course will save you money" - CodePlex Site

View the project on CodePlex now

New SharePoint Developer Portal for ASP .Net Developers

modonovan — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 11:58:37 GMT

Are you an ASP .Net developer, who is interested in developing on SharePoint (WSS or MOSS), but not sure where to start? Microsoft has just released materials targeted at you, which can be found on the new Developer Portal for SharePoint. It focuses on the top 10 developer "things" you would need to know i.e:

Web Parts
Data Lists
Event Handlers
Workflows
Silverlight Web Parts
Page Navigation
Page Branding
Web Services
Content Types
User Management

More items will be added over time, so keep visiting the portal for more information.

Absa Capital Revamps Portal with MOSS 2007

modonovan — Fri, 23 May 2008 16:51:40 GMT

"Absa Capital has revamped its web portal and standardised on Microsoft SharePoint Server" - IT-Online

Read the full article here: http://it-online.co.za/content/view/287444/142/