Hard Knocks - Ben Sufit’s Technical Blog

I once had an engineering professor that said ‘It is easy once you know how to do it.’   Obviously, but first you have to know how to do it. This is pretty basic but if you are learning SharePoint administration but I figured I would throw it up here in case someone needed to learn it.   Deploying and retracting a WSP in SharePoint 2007 is makes managing customized SharePoint sites much easier to maintain and manage.   Instead of dropping DLL’s in the GAC or bin, and adding features to the site manually, the WSP or solution package wraps customizations up into a nice portable package. There are three steps to deploying a WSP in a Farm 1.        Add the Solution to the Farm (this is the only step that must be done with the stsadm command line tool, all others can be done via the GUI in central admin) Go to a command prompt and type: stsadm –o addsolution –filename “C:\yourWSPpath\yourWSPname.wsp” 2.        Deploy the Solution to the Farm or Web app depending on how it is scoped. This i

Doing work as a developer and system administrator has some advantages.   One being that if I don’t like some of the tools that are available to system administrators, I can write my own.   We have all kinds of monitoring tools in place at my company that email me everything from drive space issues, event logs errors, ping responses and just about everything else except if the application is actually up and displaying expected information.   This means I get 200+ emails a day from systems, fine on workdays, but not so good on weekends.   The solution I came up with was to write a custom console application that reads in the HTML counts the charters.   Based on the number of characters or if an error is returned the code sends an email and a text message to specified accounts.   The reason I count the characters is because an application can throw up an error page like the IIS default page or ‘cannot connect to content database’ SharePoint error without throwing an exception.   If neede

I got this error when trying to create a site.   I checked the SharePoint logs and found the error “Procedure or function proc_UpdateListSettings has too many arguments specified.” Turns out that one of the windows updates that was pushed for contained a patch for SharePoint as well.   Another blog I read stated it was KB2493987.   This has happened once before and the fix is to run the SharePoint Products and Technologies Configuration Wizards .   This resolved the issue and site creation is now working. Extra Note:  As it turns out the upgrade ran fine on the app server, but did not run on the front end.  I ended up having to run the following command to complete it: psconfig -cmd upgrade -inplace b2b

This is a way that you can have users start a workflow without ever having to use the Metastorm dashboard.   You can also use JavaScript to remove the tool bars if needed. (See previous posts) http://<yourMetastormServer>/Metastorm/eForm.aspx?Map=<ProcessName>&Action=<StartingActionName>&Client=External

Ok, so this is follow up to a previous post on opening a Metastorm 9.x form from a link in an email.   The issue is that when you open the form with a direct link the IE tool bar shows up and the form tends to be pushed to the side and overall does not look good.   I have found about ten ways not to do this but this is one that seemed to work.   The issue is that most exchange servers will not let live JavaScript come through because it is a pretty big security risk (you could easily right emails that download viruses if they did.)   The basic strategy is to point the email link to a simple web app that you create and bounce/redirect that to the Metastorm form.   In the custom web app you can pull the required information about the form and as long as the web app is in the companies trusted zone JavaScript is usually enabled. This is a very simple example that will work as long as you are opening the form at a folder, not an action, however, the app could be extended to enable thi