Jie Li's GeekWorld

October 2009 Cumulative Update Packages for SharePoint Server 2007 and Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 are published

opal — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 03:07:00 GMT

The server-packages of October 2009 Cumulative Update for Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 and Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 are ready for download. October 2009 Cumulative Updates introduce more rules on Pre-Upgrade Checker, which can help customers to prepare the upgrade of their SharePoint farm to SharePoint 2010.

Download Information

Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 October 2009 cumulative update package
http://support.microsoft.com/hotfix/KBHotfix.aspx?kbnum=974989

Office SharePoint Server 2007 October 2009 cumulative update package
http://support.microsoft.com/hotfix/KBHotfix.aspx?kbnum=974988

Detail Description

Description of the Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 October 2009 cumulative update package
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/974989 (link may not be live yet)

Description of the Office SharePoint Server 2007 October 2009 cumulative update package
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/974988 (link may not be live yet)

Installation Recommendation for a fresh SharePoint Server

To keep all files in a SharePoint installation up-to-date, the following sequence is recommended.

Please note: Start from April 2009 Cumulative Update, the packages will no longer install on a farm without a service pack installed. You must have installed either Service Pack 1 (SP1) or SP2 prior to the installation of the cumulative updates.

After applying the preceding updates, run the SharePoint Products and Technologies Configuration Wizard or “psconfig -cmd upgrade -inplace b2b -wait” in command line. This needs to be done on every server in the farm with SharePoint installed.

The version of content databases should be 12.0.6520.5000 after successfully applying these updates.

You can also refer to April Cumulative Update post for deployment guides, slipstream how-to links and FAQs.

Jie Li

Technical Product Manager, SharePoint

SharePoint 2010 Pre-Requisites Download Links

opal — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 21:17:00 GMT

Update: Windows PowerShell v2 RTM download link, KB971831 download link

If you don’t have internet connection on the machine you want to install SharePoint 2010, then you need to download pre-requisites manually.

Note: This article applies only to Beta 2 (Public Beta) currently, I will update this when it’s RTM. If you are using Technical Preview, then this does not apply to you.

The download links will be provided when you click Learn more about these prerequisites in the pre-req installer tool. However, this link is not activated yet. So I will list the links below.

SharePoint Server

The following is needed for installation on Windows 2008 R2 and Windows Server 2008.

KB971831 (currently this KB does not apply to 2008 R2, I’ll update when it’s availiable. )

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/971831 (this is the KB article)

http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/Project/Download/FileDownload.aspx?ProjectName=KB971831&DownloadId=7285 (this is the download)

Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Native Client:
http://download.microsoft.com/download/3/5/5/35522a0d-9743-4b8c-a5b3-f10529178b8a/sqlncli.msi

Microsoft "Geneva" Framework Runtime
http://download.microsoft.com/download/F/3/D/F3D66A7E-C974-4A60-B7A5-382A61EB7BC6/MicrosoftGenevaFramework.amd64.msi

Microsoft Sync Framework Runtime v1.0 (x64)
http://download.microsoft.com/download/C/9/F/C9F6B386-824B-4F9E-BD5D-F95BB254EC61/Redist/amd64/Microsoft%20Sync%20Framework/Synchronization.msi

Microsoft Chart Controls for Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5
http://download.microsoft.com/download/c/c/4/cc4dcac6-ea60-4868-a8e0-62a8510aa747/MSChart.exe

Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Analysis Services ADOMD.NET
http://download.microsoft.com/download/A/D/0/AD021EF1-9CBC-4D11-AB51-6A65019D4706/SQLSERVER2008_ASADOMD10.msi

Filter Pack 2.0 should be already included in installation files.

On Windows Server 2008, additional files are needed.

.Net Framework 3.5 SP1

.NET Framework 3.5 Service Pack 1 (Full Package) KB959209 KB967190

PowerShell V2 RTM (It's better to use RTM than CTP3 - Remoting is not working correctly in older builds)

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=d37e25cf-db05-4b23-a852-cdf865d81b82&displaylang=en

SQL Server 2005 Patches

SQL Server 2005 SP3

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=AE7387C3-348C-4FAA-8AE5-949FDFBE59C4&displaylang=en

CU3 for SQL Server 2005 SP3

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/967909

SQL Server 2008 Patches

SQL Server 2008 SP1

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=66AB3DBB-BF3E-4F46-9559-CCC6A4F9DC19&displaylang=en

CU2 for SQL Server 2008 SP1

Cumulative update package 2 for SQL Server 2008 Service Pack 1

Hope this helps.

Jie Li

Technical Product Manager, SharePoint

Index and Search PDF Files in SharePoint Server 2010

opal — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 16:38:00 GMT

Like Office SharePoint Server 2007, there’s no OOTB PDF iFilter in SharePoint Server 2010. If you add PDF as a file type for SharePoint Search, you will get the following result:

You can see that only the file attributes are indexed.

You need to install a x64 PDF iFilter for this. There’re three PDF iFilter on market, Adobe, Foxit, and TET. You can refer to my earlier post for comparison. Since the registry name is changed in 2010, you may need to manually modify it to make the iFilters registered. Foxit recently updated their installer to reflect this change.

http://www.foxitsoftware.com/pdf/ifilter/

Quote from Foxit PDF iFilter change log:

Version Number: 1.0.0.3213

* Fixes a crash issue that is caused by embedded fonts.

* Adds the following registry settings in the installation program:

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Office Server\14.0\Search\Setup\Filters\.pdf]

"Extension"=".pdf"

"FileTypeBucket"=dword:00000001

"MimeTypes"="application/pdf"

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Office Server\14.0\Search\Setup\ContentIndexCommon\Filters\Extension\.pdf]

@="{987f8d1a-26e6-4554-b007-6b20e2680632}"

So run the installer, and then restart SharePoint Server Search 14 service. This service name is subject to change when RTM, but you can easily get the idea.

Recrawl the files.

It worked. Please note the installer will not get you PDF icon file, you need to follow the steps here http://www.foxitsoftware.com/pdf/ifilter/installation.html to download icon file and modify DOCICON.XML.

This also applies to Search Server 2010. FAST Search index PDF files OOTB, so you don’t need to go with these steps.

Jie Li

Technical Product Manager, SharePoint

SharePoint 2010 - What does that mean for IT Pros?

opal — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 16:00:00 GMT

So, it’s time to lift the curtain. For people at SharePoint Conference 2009, feel free to meet me on the site. For those IT administrators who can’t make it to Vegas, here’s something you should know about SharePoint 2010. Of course, you should check out http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=165421 (link may not be activated yet) for IT Pro Evaluation Guide. Shane Young did a good job on this guide and he definitely should be given a credit. :)

If you are a new Administrator for SharePoint, you can try our free screencast series Getting Started with SharePoint 2010 on TechNet. It is done by 5 SharePoint MVPs, covers from level 50~300, 9 modules.

Installation and Upgrade Requirements

Requirements! Keep in mind that SharePoint 2010 is 64bit only, so it’s time to upgrade your server operating systems to x64. 64 bit architecture brings more memory support, not only the total amount of memory can be supported, but also how much memory that a single process can address. You can refer to the following two articles for 64bit benefit details and plan for upgrade.

Advantages of 64-bit hardware and software (Office SharePoint Server 2007)

Migrate an existing server farm to a 64-bit environment (Office SharePoint Server 2007)

Note: Nearly any server hardware you can find on the market after year 2005 is 64 bit capable.

Hardware requirement

I don’t want to go through the whole piece of hardware requirement, but just to point out some important things.

For production environment, the memory is recommended to be 8GB or above. SharePoint 2010 introduces a lot of new service applications, things like Visio service, Access service all consume memory. You can still run SharePoint with 4GB memory, or maybe even less, but for performance consideration you should give it more. After all, 16GB DDR2 FB-DIMM only costs ~400 dollars today (10/19/2009) on Newegg.

Always use fast disk arrays for your SQL Server. Don’t install SQL Server on the same machine with SharePoint unless it’s not for production.

Software requirement

Operating System: Windows Server 2008 or Windows Server 2008 R2 (Patches will be installed with pre-req installer)

Developers can install SharePoint 2010 on Windows 7, but this should not be used in production.

Database: SQL Server 2005 SP3 with CU3 or SQL Server 2008 SP1 with CU2 or SQL Server 2008 R2 (still in beta but will be supported when RTM)

The following figure shows what will happen if you don’t have the correct CU applied on SQL Server.

.Net Framework version: 3.51 (.Net Framework 4 is not supported currently)

If you want to upgrade from SharePoint Server 2007, then you need to make sure at least service pack 2 is applied on the farm. Otherwise it will be blocked. The following figure is to show the logs when Upgrade-SPContentDatabase cmdlet is run on a database older than SP2 (12.0.0.6421) attached to the 2010 server farm. The upgrade is blocked right away, because database schema did not meet the minimum requirement.

Client Browser Support

We made a great progress to replace ActiveX controls with AJAX and Silverlight, and made the pages compatible with the web standards, to support a broad selection of the browsers cross platforms.

Support Level	Browser	Jie’s Comments
Level 1	Internet Explorer 7 & 8, 32 bit	Even you are running a 64 bit operating system, your Internet Explorer is 32 bit by default.
	Firefox 3.x on Windows, 32bit	Yeah, Firefox jumps their versions quickly, we will have new support claims when they have new version 4 after testing work is done.
Level 2	Internet Explorer 7 & 8, 64 bit	Most of the time you won’t have this scenario.
	Firefox 3.x on non-Windows	Linux, Mac…
	Safari	Good for Mac and iPhone users
Level 3	Internet Explorer 6, Chrome, Opera…	Some of the browsers might work, but since we did not test them, they are not supported.

Note: Mobile Browsers are supported with Mobile View.

Details of system requirements can be found here:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc262485(office.14).aspx (Link may not activated yet)

Improvements for IT Pros

Scale with Governance

Investment on SharePoint 2010 focused on better scalability, with less chaos. With the new architecture of Service Applications and Protocols, SharePoint 2010 can scale from a single server for small business to multiple server farm or even multi tenancy hosting deployment in large enterprise. With the benefit of x64 hardware, we tested up to 50 million items in a single document library, 100 million items in a single search index. Unlike SharePoint 2007, now you can have multiple indexer to crawl your content at the same time. With FAST for SharePoint and FAST ESP, your enterprise search solution can also scale up to billions of items easily. Resource Throttling can help when end users make some “bad” moves on the server. For example, if a user want to sort on a big document library with more than 5000 items in a view, he will be stopped and informed that he can use other ways to achieve his goal, without slow down the whole server farm.

Deployment Flexibility

If you have installation experience from SharePoint 2003 and 2007, you will be surprised on how many steps you need to go to get a 2010 server farm up and running. Prerequisites can be downloaded and installed automatically, Configuration Wizard reduces the pain to setup every service applications. We also support scriptable deployment with Windows Powershell, automation guys would love it. Virtualization is supported everywhere, it helps on scalability, management, high availability and disaster recovery.

Intranet, Internet, Extranet…SharePoint 2007 has been proven to handle all these deployment scenarios. Now SharePoint Server 2010 also support multi-tenancy. You can even setup a SharePoint hosting solution in your own organization.

Keep in mind, no matter when, we always recommend you to use complete server farm installation mode. And it would be better to avoid installation on a Domain Controller in production unless you are running SBS. SQL Server should always be separated on a different box too to get much better performance.

IT Productivity

Windows PowerShell, Ribbon UI, Health Monitoring… There’re a lot of tools and features to make SharePoint Administrators exciting.

People already started to use Windows PowerShell for 2003 and 2007 management. However, it is more like to deal with object models. For me, it’s more like a developer job, not that easy for IT Professionals. In 2010 we introduced more than 500 cmdlets for SharePoint, from site creation to service application management. Although sometimes you still need to use STSADM, most of the time, Windows PowerShell is the way to go. With the powerful script environment, some large operations used to take hours to finish now can be done in minutes.

For example, the following script can get the sizes of all sites owned by a user quickly.

Get-SPSite -Limit ALL -Filter {$_.Owner -eq "contoso\sp_admin"} | Select URL, @{Name="Storage"; Expression={"{0:N2} GB" -f ($_.Usage.Storage/1000000)}

A health and monitoring center is offered directly in Central Administration. It is also called SharePoint Best Practice Analyzer (SBPA). SBPA is rule based, it use timer jobs to run the rules and detect problems in the server farm. It can also has Actions implemented, to fix the problems just by several clicks. When a problem is found, it is displayed in a health report page, administrators can also set alerts with emails or SMS to get informed. This rules system can also be extended with your own custom rules.

Ribbon UI is introduced in SharePoint 2010 everywhere. With a completely redesigned Central Administration site, It greatly reduced the time and clicks to manage services, web applications and site collections.

Visual Upgrade can help Administrators to switch between 2007 look and 2010 look. If the new one does not work, switch it back to fix the problem.

Conclusion

That’s already a lot of things, right? Especially Windows PowerShell support, that is a huge change in IT Pro’s life. At first you may find it’s a little bit tough, but after you know the basic concept of it, you will benefit from it and never want to turn back.

There’ll be a lot of blog posts coming after, so please stay tuned. Meanwhile, remember to download the bits when it is public on Nov. Check out IT Pro Evaluation Guide on TechNet for complete explanation of all new features for IT Pro.

Jie Li

Technical Product Manager, SharePoint

Will you come to SharePoint Conference 2009?

opal — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 03:02:03 GMT

If you will, put these pics on your blog, on your web sites, or on wherever you want! It’s time to social!

“Fix” SharePoint 302 redirect problem by IIS7 and URL Rewrite

opal — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 23:00:00 GMT

Recently in my spare time I’m helping my friends to get their internet facing sharepoint site up and running. Since this is for the internet, the first thing they need to consider is SEO. So we have a well known problem now: SharePoint use 302 temp redirect instead of 301. If you do a search for “sharepoint 302” you will see a lot of articles talking about the problem.

Here’s the default SharePoint Site. The request was temporarily redirected (302) to Pages/default.aspx. Search engine bots don’t like it, they like 301. So this is BAD.

How to solve it? Oh, I’m a IT Pro person, I don’t want to deal with a custom redirect HttpModule – god knows what will happen if those custom code mess up my sites! So any other options?

I’m lucky because I installed SharePoint on Windows Server 2008, so I can use IIS7 features. I downloaded URL Rewrite module from http://www.iis.net/extensions/URLRewrite, installed it, and started to configure the redirect.

Choose your site in IIS Manager, click URL Rewrite, and create a new blank rule.

Use Regular Expressions to match ^$ (which means “empty”). Set Action Type to Redirect, and add the redirect URL (by default should be Pages/default.aspx), set redirect type to Permanent (301). You are all set!

Now, clear browser cache and revisit the site:

It is 301 now! Pretty easy, isn’t it?

URL Rewrite module is great. If you are a regex guru you can also create more complex rules to make everything fit for your site.

Upgrade Checker in SP2 – Behind the Scene

opal — Tue, 12 May 2009 00:11:00 GMT

Following the pervious post Upgrade Checker in SP2 – prepare your way to SharePoint Server 2010, here’s the detail of what upgrade checker checks.

Where are the upgrade checker rules?

The upgrade checker rules can be found at

X:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\12\CONFIG\PreUpgradeCheck

By default, there’re two rule files, one for WSS(WSSPreUpgradeCheck.XML) and one for MOSS(OssPreUpgradeCheck.XML). You can create your own rule files and put it into this directory. The checker will automatically load them.

How to use upgrade checker?

A simple answer is, run

"X:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\12\BIN\STSADM.EXE" -o preupgradecheck

X is the drive letter you install SharePoint.

There’re a few options with this operation, for example you can use “–rulefiles rulefilename” to specify which rule file it should check, “-localonly” to only check those rules marked as localonly. This could help you in certain scenarios.

The syntax of upgrade checker can be found here:

Preupgradecheck: Stsadm operation (Windows SharePoint Services)

How does upgrade checker check my farm?

By calling object model. You can check this by opening the rule files in a XML editor yourself. Microsoft.SharePoint.Administration.Health is responsible for most of the rules. Here’s an example to check OSreqs.

If you are familiar with BestPracticeAnalyzer, you can also find these:

These are used to help check group, registry, sql and WMI objects.

There’re two rule types, Information and Error, what’s the difference?

Information rules will check server farm for certain configurations, which would need to be considered during the upgrade process. The configurations that being checked here will not stop you from upgrade, but you might need to follow the advice to upgrade the farm. These rules also tell you the summary of the farm, to help you estimate the time needed for upgrade. For example, UpgradeType rule will check your farm for eligible upgrade methods, ServerInfo will list all the server names in the farm.

Error rules will check if there’s anything wrong which could prevent things from being upgraded. For example, your server does not meet Windows Server 2008 x64 requirement, any orphaned objects in your farm that would not be a part of upgrade process, etc.

Any explanation for the rules shipped with SP2?

You can also refer to TechNet article here for WSS rules:

Pre-upgrade scanning and reporting for future releases (Windows SharePoint Services)

There’s not enough detail in the document, so I borrowed their nice table and added my own comments here:

ServerInfo
Description: All servers that are running SharePoint bits in the farm. Basically this is just a list of servers.

FarmInfo
Description: The components of this farm. For “components” it means how many servers, web apps, content dbs, and site collections in your farm. A sample report is here:

1 servers
3 web applications
3 content databases, approximately total size = 108199936 bytes
4 Site collections

UpgradeType
Description: The upgrade types supported by the farm. For most of the server farms, there will be two method available, Inplace Upgrade and Content Database Attach. Content Database Attach (also called DB Attach in some materials) is a recommended way to upgrade.

SiteTemplates
Description: This farm uses the following site definitions. This rule will list all the site defs in the farm, sample here (WSS+Search Server):

name = STS, language = 1033, template id = 1, count = 1, status = Internal
name = MPS, language = 1033, template id = 2, count = 0, status = Internal
name = CENTRALADMIN, language = 1033, template id = 3, count = 1, status = Internal
name = WIKI, language = 1033, template id = 4, count = 0, status = Internal
name = BLOG, language = 1033, template id = 9, count = 0, status = Internal
name = OSRV, language = 1033, template id = 40, count = 1, status = Installed
name = SRCHCENTERLITE, language = 1033, template id = 90, count = 1, status = Installed

Features
Description: The features installed on the farm. This would be a big list for every feature you installed on the farm. Sample:

Name = [S2SearchAdmin], Feature id = [2b1e4cbf-b5ba-48a4-926a-37100ad77dee], Reference count = [1], Scope = [Site], Status = [Installed]

LanguagePacks
Description: The language packs required for the farm. If you have any other language packs installed on your farm, you will need to install new SharePoint 2010 language pack after the upgrade process.

AAMURLs
Description: AAM URLs within the current environment to be considered when upgrading. It will list all AAMs, sample:

name = [Central Administration], zone = [Default], public Url = http://iws1:2000, internal Url = http://iws1:2000
name = [SharePoint - 80], zone = [Default], public Url = http://iws1, internal Url = http://iws1
name = [SharePoint - 80], zone = [Internet], public Url = http://www.mssearch.cn, internal Url = http://www.mssearch.cn

OSType
Description: This server machine in the farm does not have the 64-bit edition of Windows Server 2008 or later installed. I would assume that you already know the system requirements of SharePoint Server 2010, if you don’t, please refer to Richard’s post here:Announcing SharePoint Server 2010 Preliminary System Requirements

DatabaseSchema
Description: Content databases are modified by user, and cannot be upgraded.
Sometimes this things do happen, especially with wrong patch process. For example, I know an admin patched the farm database, and didn’t patch other servers in the farm so they are not working. What he did was, directly modify the database schema version to older ones! You should NEVER do this. Direct modification to SharePoint Content DB should always be avoided.

DataOrphan
Description: Content databases contain orphans. This will be reported when the items has no relationship with the parent. For example, a corruption happened in content DB so a site has no web, a list with no parent list. STSADM operation databaserepair will be suggested to find and fix the errors.

SiteOrphan
Description: Some sites cannot be referenced properly. Sometimes site collections are not in the sitemap, which cannot be upgraded. This could happen when you have duplicated URLs/hostheaders. You could detach the content DB or delete the site collection to fix this.

UnfinishedGradualUpgrade
Description: This farm is currently being upgraded by using the gradual upgrade process.
If there’re still some V2 sites (WSS v2 and SPS2003) inside the content DB which are not upgraded properly, you need to first finish this process.

MissingWebConfig
Description: This Web site does not have a web.config file. This definitely is a problem, so you may need to copy a web.config there.

InvalidHostNames
Description: Invalid host names found. This actually checks if there’re any reference with “http://localhost”. You need to change this to something that make sense.

InvalidServiceAccount
Description: The application pool account must be fixed. “NT AUTHORITY\LOCAL SYSTEM” and “NT AUTHORITY\LOCAL SERVICE” should not be used as app pool account.

DatabaseReadOnly
Description: Databases in this farm are configured as read-only and the upgrade will fail unless they are configured as read-write. Of course.

WYukonLargeDatabase
Description: Databases in this farm are hosted on the Windows Internal Database uses SQL Server technology as a relational data store for Windows roles and features only, such as Windows SharePoint Services, Active Directory Rights Management Services, UDDI Services, Windows Server Update Services, and Windows System Resources Manager. and are larger than 4 gigabytes.

WYukonLargeSiteCollection
Description: Site collections in this farm are hosted on the Windows Internal Database and are larger than 4 gigabytes.

There’re two additional rules for MOSS to check search related stuff. They check for server names, content sources, indexed file numbers, index size and search DB size, etc. You can figure them out by yourself.

Upgrade Checker in SP2 – prepare your way to SharePoint Server 2010

opal — Fri, 08 May 2009 22:55:00 GMT

The upgrade checker in MOSS/WSS SP2 stsadm operation is very useful. It checks server farm for system requirements, database health and a list of rules. The rules can also be extended.

To use upgrade checker, first open a command line prompt, and run

"X:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\12\BIN\STSADM.EXE" -o preupgradecheck

(X is the drive letter where you install SharePoint)

Make sure you are in administrator mode. Otherwise it would be denied.

You can see there’re a list of rules checked by the operation. I ~~will~~ have a seperate post talk about the detail of each rule.

SearchContentSourcesInfo
SearchInfo
ServerInfo
FarmInfo
UpgradeTypes
SiteDefinitionInfo
LanguagePackInfo
FeatureInfo
AamUrls
LargeList
CustomListViewInfo
CustomFieldTypeInfo
CustomWorkflowActionsFileInfo
ModifiedWebConfigWorkflowAuthorizedTypesInfo
ModifiedWorkflowActionsFileInfo
DisabledWorkFlowsInfo
OSPrerequisite
WindowsInternalDatabaseMigration
WindowsInternalDatabaseSite
MissingWebConfig
ReadOnlyDatabase
InvalidDatabaseSchema
ContentOrphan
SiteOrphan
PendingUpgrade
InvalidServiceAccount
InvalidHostName

A successful run could show the following:

Hey, we got a “OSPrerequisite… Failed” here. So let’s take a look at the report.

The report will give you the following information:

Search content sources and start addresses

Office Server Search topology information

Servers in the current farm

The components from this farm

Supported upgrade types

Site Definition Information

Language pack information

Feature Information

Alternate Access Mapping Url(s) within the current environment that should be considered when upgrading.

Lists and Libraries

Customized field types that will not be upgraded

Windows SharePoint Services Search topology information

And also the failed items it checked.

In my case, because this machine is still on Windows Server 2003 32bit, so it does not meet the requirement of SharePoint Server 2010, which needs to be install on Windows Server 2008 x64.

Failed : This server machine in the farm does not have Windows Server 2008 or higher 64 bit edition installed.

Upgrading to Windows SharePoint Services 4.0 requires Windows Server 2008 or higher 64 bit edition.
Please upgrade the server machines in your farm to Windows Server 2008 64 bit edition, or create a new farm and attach the content from this farm. For more information about this rule, see KB article 954770 in the rule article list at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=120257.

I will explain the detail of the checker in another post later.

Update: the post is here: http://blogs.msdn.com/opal/archive/2009/05/12/upgrade-checker-in-sp2-behind-the-scene.aspx

Install MOSS 2007 & WSS 3.0 on Windows Server 2008 R2 – you will need SP2 slipstream

opal — Thu, 07 May 2009 21:00:38 GMT

Windows Server 2008 R2 RC is avaliable several days ago. You may ask questions: What if I want to install WSS/MOSS on Windows Server 2008 R2? Is that supported?

The answer: WSS/MOSS RTM & SP1 is not supported on WS2008R2. But with SP2, it is supported. If you try to run the installer without SP2 slipstreamed, it would be blocked and you cannot continue. Meanwhile, if you want to use SQL Server 2008, you will also need to apply SQL Server 2008 SP1 on it after installation.

So slipstream build of WSS and MOSS SP2 is required. WSS SP2 slipstream build can be found here: x86 x64. There’s no slipstream build for MOSS so you need to create your own one. Here’s a quick guide:

Remove all stuff inside the Updates folder of your MOSS installation directory. Download both wss and moss SP2 packages, extract them in command line using /extract:drive\path option, and then put all into the Updates folder. Delete Wsssetup.dll, this is important. Otherwise only WSS SP2 will be installed.

More details can be found on TechNet.

With SP2 slipstreamed, you can run the installer without any problem now. After installation, site version will be 12.0.0.6421.

Windows Server 2008 SP2 is also supported by MOSS/WSS SP2.

PDF iFilter Battle, second round

opal — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 22:30:34 GMT

If you still remember the last round of our PDF iFilter battle, FoxIT won it. Now in this round, we bring in another challenger: TET PDF iFIlter. It is also avaliable on x86 and x64, free for non-commercial desktop use, will need a license for Server installation.

So here's the new result for file set II:

	File Number	Total File Size(MB)	Avg File Size(MB)	Crawl Time(m:s)	Crawl Time(s)	File Per Second	Success	Error
FoxIT	2676	2406	0.90	7:46	466	5.74	2759	0
Adobe	2676	2406	0.90	40:58	2458	1.09	2757	2
TET	2676	2406	0.90	13:48	828	3.23	2752	0

I also obtained an archive copy from People's Daily, from 2001 to 2006. ~20,000 PDF files, 13.4GB total. Tested on a 8 cores XEON box.

	File Number	Total File Size(MB)	Avg File Size(MB)	Crawl Time(h:m:s)	Crawl Time(s)	File Per Second	Success	Error
FoxIT	19890	13793	0.69	00:30:53	1853	10.73	19884	7
Adobe	19890	13793	0.69	05:19:04	19144	1.03	19887	4
TET	19890	13793	0.69	01:40:09	6009	3.31	19879	12

And licensing comparsion for production(USD):

	Desktop	Server	1-2 Cores Per Server	4 Cores Per Server	8+ Cores Per Server
Adobe	Free	Free	Free	Free	Free
Foxit	Free	Not Free	329.99	589.97	1109.93
TET	$119 for commercial usage	Not Free	595	595	595

Summary

It is good to see another vendor joined this market. TET showed good performance, although still behind Foxit. But it's licensed based on servers not cores, the cost would be lower than Foxit if you have a typical 2 way quad cores box.

PDF iFilter Battle! FoxIT vs.. Adobe, 64bit version

opal — Wed, 10 Dec 2008 07:46:28 GMT

After so long a time Adobe finally released its 64bit version of PDF iFilter!

http://www.adobe.com/support/downloads/detail.jsp?ftpID=4025

“In response to customer requests, Adobe is releasing Adobe PDF iFilter 9 for 64-bit platforms, which will allow searching PDF files on Microsoft® Windows® 64-bit platforms for applications such as Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007, Microsoft Exchange Server 2007, and Microsoft SQL Server 2005.”

But, what about performance? How does it compare with FoxIT 64bit PDF iFilter?

My friend Deb Haldar did a performance test last year for their 32bit iFilters. You can find the result here: FOXIT vs.. Adobe PDF IFilter [ 32-bit only ]. Let’s say, FoxIT 32bit PDF iFilter is more than 4 times faster than the Adobe one.

Will the story change in 64bit age?

I picked about two sets of PDF files. Set I contains ~1000 PDF files, 1.7 GB in total. Set 2 contians ~2600 files, 2.4G in total. Language is mixed by 30% Chinese, 70% US English. The hardware spec is a two-way dual core XEON at 3.4GHz, 4G Ram. SharePoint was patched with October CU. Here’s the result.

	File Set	File Number	Total File Size(MB)	Avg File Size(MB)	Crawl Time(m:s)	Crawl Time(s)	File Per Second	Success	Error
FoxIT	I	1041	1751	1.68	6:02	362	2.88	1064	0
Adobe	I	1041	1751	1.68	30:03	1803	0.58	1063	1
FoxIT	II	2676	2406	0.90	7:46	466	5.74	2759	0
Adobe	II	2676	2406	0.90	40:58	2458	1.09	2757	2

On average, FoxIT x64 PDF ifilter is still ~5 times faster than the Adobe one. But FoxIT charges 330 USD for a 2 core machine, while Adobe PDF iFilter is free. So if PDF indexing is the key to your business, go with FoxIT to get much better performance. If not, you may play with Adobe PDF iFilter to furfill some simple and basic request.

Important: Check MS08-067 and Apply the Update!

opal — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 21:47:00 GMT

This vulnerability is marked as “Critical”, and nearly all windows product are affected.

Although it was reported privately to Microsoft and no expolit code leaked now, it is always safer to take action immediately. If you don’t do that, later hackers and worms might be able to attack your machines through RPC service from Internet, and take full control of your machine.

If automatic update is turned on, you will receive the update now. Apply it, make a restart.

For IT Pros, you need to check this for details:

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/Bulletin/MS08-067.mspx

In case you need to download the files manually:

Operating System	Maximum Security Impact	Aggregate Severity Rating	Bulletins Replaced by this Update
Microsoft Windows 2000 Service Pack 4	Remote Code Execution	Critical	MS06-040
Windows XP Service Pack 2	Remote Code Execution	Critical	MS06-040
Windows XP Service Pack 3	Remote Code Execution	Critical	None
Windows XP Professional x64 Edition	Remote Code Execution	Critical	MS06-040
Windows XP Professional x64 Edition Service Pack 2	Remote Code Execution	Critical	None
Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 1	Remote Code Execution	Critical	MS06-040
Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 2	Remote Code Execution	Critical	None
Windows Server 2003 x64 Edition	Remote Code Execution	Critical	MS06-040
Windows Server 2003 x64 Edition Service Pack 2	Remote Code Execution	Critical	None
Windows Server 2003 with SP1 for Itanium-based Systems	Remote Code Execution	Critical	MS06-040
Windows Server 2003 with SP2 for Itanium-based Systems	Remote Code Execution	Critical	None
Windows Vista and Windows Vista Service Pack 1	Remote Code Execution	Important	None
Windows Vista x64 Edition and Windows Vista x64 Edition Service Pack 1	Remote Code Execution	Important	None
Windows Server 2008 for 32-bit Systems*	Remote Code Execution	Important	None
Windows Server 2008 for x64-based Systems*	Remote Code Execution	Important	None
Windows Server 2008 for Itanium-based Systems	Remote Code Execution	Important	None

Although this is only a security fix for the OS, as a SharePoint Developer/Administrator, you will always be responsibile for the security issues. So let’s prevent things from happen at the beginning.

Search Suggestions in IE8 with SharePoint/Search Server

opal — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 03:23:13 GMT

IE8 Beta 2 has been there for a while. Although it is not supported to use together with SharePoint products yet (there’s no chance to support a beta product), you can still try it out. There’re couple of new features introduced like WebSlices, Accelerators and Search Suggestions.

Search Suggestions! Isn’t it cool to make your intranet SharePoint portal to be a Search Provider and have this lovely suggestion feature?

However, by default you can make SharePoint a Search Provider, but no way to add a suggestion feature.

So here it comes – an update to “Search As Your Type(SAYT)” codeplex project, with Search Suggestion working in IE8! And I also included a small green “S” logo icon file for that, all free:)

Since it needs time to update codeplex project, I’ll put something here.

1. Install SAYT on your SharePoint Server/Search Server as instructed. Do some test searches, to make sure it works.

2. Download new update from here:

http://cid-8007edf5c56fc334.skydrive.live.com/self.aspx/Public/SharePointSearchIE8.zip

3. Extract this zip file, copy all files to the directory you put GetInfo.aspx in first step, and overwrite it.

4. Modify ssprovider.xml as needed. Replace SharePointSearchCenter and SAYTUrl with your own ones.

5. Use IE8 to navigate to add.html, and add search provider.

6. Choose the green “S” provider and try it out!

You can add a sample provider on http://www.mssearch.cn:8099/add.aspx, and try type in “search server” to see the result.

Disclaimer: This code is not support by Microsoft, if you have problems, leave your comment here. SAYT Codeplex project will be updated later to include this feature.

IE 8.0 Beta 2 with SharePoint, what’s the story?

opal — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 09:47:50 GMT

Today Internet Explorer 8.0 Beta 2 was released. Well, if you tried Beta 1 with Office SharePoint Server 2007 or Windows SharePoint Services 3.0, you may notice that some of the features like content editor webpart does not function properly, even in IE7 mode.

But IE7 mode should be the same as original IE7, not to cause new problems. After several months’ bugfix and feature improvement, that problem now is gone.

There’re also some changes between IE8 Beta 1 and Beta 2. For example, there’s no IE7 mode button anymore, it is changed to a “Compatibility View” button next to refresh button. And that is not turned on by default.

So what will happen if I use IE8 Beta 2 to access a SharePoint site?

That depends on your master page of the site. IE8 Beta 2 will check DOCTYPE and meta tag to determine wether to use Compatibility View or not. If there is no DOCTYPE indicated in the page, IE8 Beta 2 will use this mode by default, and you will not see the button at all. This is what happened for default master pages come with SharePoint Server. All things should work by default.

It is quite common that you are using your own modified themes in master pages. So what if DOCTYPE is there in the pages? Will it cause any problem?

Maybe. But if you want to ensure everything works, I would recommend to add a meta tag in your master pages:

When IE8 Beta 2 reads this line, it will automatically switch to Compatibility View and make everything right. This can be seen as a temporary solution. IE8 native mode will be supported in future SharePoint v3 service pack.

Troubleshooting Windows Search CPU Consuming Problem

opal — Sun, 13 Jul 2008 20:23:08 GMT

I have heard a lot of complains from my friends and the community that desktop search interferes their daily usage of the computer. These applications, such as Windows Search(also known as WDS, Windows Desktop Search, and the builtin search engine in Vista/2008), Google Desktop Search, index your files while the computer is idle. In this theory, it should not affect your PC’s performance. However, sometimes you can notice that your CPU usage goes up to 100% (or 50% for a dual core system, with 100% usage for one of the cores) for quite a few minutes, even when you are busily working with some applications. This not only brings down the performance of your current applications, but also affects your battery life if you are using a laptop in mobile, and boring fan noise.

So, it is really a nasty problem. When you bring up task manager, you can see something relates with Search is sucking power from your CPU. In my experience, the name is SearchFilterHost.exe. Let’s take a look at it with Sysinternal’s Process Explorer, to understand the relationship of the services.

This is a child process of Windows Search. Without any thoughts, I killed this process, and after a short while it restarted, again with 50%+ CPU usage. Nasty. It’s quite hard to identify Windows Search problem because it cannot tell you what kind of thing it is working on (except those guys who can understand minidumps and can trace into the process, who is really a minority in our IT guys). But by its name, I can know it is a filter host, and with another child process in this tree, I can understand the two process is working on search job, one for the protocol of the file, one for the filter of the file.

Filter daemon is a common part of Microsoft Search architecture. SharePoint, SQL and Windows Search using this daemon to load ifilters, and extract information from different types of files. If this process takes a lot of CPU power, it is quite possible the ifilter is suffering from some problem. And it’s quite likely, the ifilter encountered something it cannot process.

Let’s take a look at the threads of SearchFilterHost. You can notice that one of the thread, RPCRT4.dll, is sucking CPU power. RPC stands for Remote Procedure Call, this can be another evidence.

Now, I’m suspecting there’s a corrupt or misformat file caused the problem. Because it’s corrupt, the ifilter might not be able to process it correctly, and the dead cycles drained all the processing power of the core. But with no log of activity from Windows Search, how can I know which file caused the problem?

Process Monitor is the tool this time. It is also from Sysinternal, as a combination or replacement for FILEMON/REGMON. Run it with filter setting to include all related processes, monitor only file activities, and wait for the problem to reappear.

After a short while, CPU usage goes up again. Stop the capture, and take a look at the log.

Only SearchIndexer is working, and this already lasts for quite a moment. This is abnormal, because it should load protocol daemon and filter daemon to process different files. Another evidence for the suspect of corrupt file. Now scroll up, try to find what is the last file it accessed.

Now it is clear, the indexer loaded “KurzfassungvonInhalt.docx” into memory, and stuck there for a few minutes. That file, should be the root cause of the problem.

I really didn’t have a idea that why this file is on my harddisk. But then I remembered this file was sent to me by one of my friend in Germany, she told me she had a word doc which she cannot open any more, and asked me to try to fix it if possible. If you open this file by Word, you will see an error notice.

I removed the file, and the CPU usage problem went away.

In a similar case, I observed some doc files which produced by WPS Pro edition(a Office clone in China, while its personal edition does not have the problem) caused the same problem. These files can be opened in MS Word, but cannot be processed by the ifilter. I don’t have the idea with doc files from OpenOffice, but these experiences might help you to identify the reason if you are suffering from the same problem.

Process Explorer and Process Monitor can be downloaded from http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/default.aspx, or www.sysinternals.com. Don’t capture too many events with Process Monitor at one time, otherwise your RAM will run out.