Tag Archives: SharePoint

Creating a BCS Content Source using PowerShell

You can use the following command to create a content source to crawl a Business Data Connectivity Service (BDCS).

$lobSystems = @("LOBSystemName1","LOBSystemNameInstance1") 
New-SPEnterpriseSearchCrawlContentSource -name "My Content Source Name" -searchapplication "My Search Service Application Name" -Type Business -LOBSystemSet $lobSystems

If the LOBSystemName is not correct the content source gets created but the model you want to search is not checked.

To figure out the right values for the LOBSystemName and LOBSystemInstanceName look no further than the bdcm file in your solution. Open the .bdcm file in notepad and use the Name attributes of the LobSystem and LobSystemInstance nodes.

SharePoint Health Monitor App

13 Replies

Introducing the SharePoint Health Monitor App. More details coming soon once the app is published in the marketplace.

Here’s a sneak peak.

What’s even more awesome? This app was exclusively developed on the Surface RT using the Touch Cover.

Troubleshooting the ’403 Forbidden’ error for SharePoint & ASP.NET Apps

ULS Viewer stops working

8 Replies

If ULS Viewer suddenly stops reading from the ULS log, the quick fix is to move all the log files to another folder. Except for the last log file which Explorer will anyway prevent you from moving.

The issue is most probably because one or more files in the folder are not in the right format and trip up ULS Viewer.

Some have reported the *upgrade.log files as the culprit. Deleting them didn’t fix it for me so I just deleted all the files.

PS: If your a SharePoint dev and your not using the ULS Viewer from Microsoft (no not the one from CodePlex). Do yourself a favour and give it a try.
http://archive.msdn.microsoft.com/ULSViewer

Limit SQL Server memory usage on your workstation, laptop or VM

7 Replies

Here’s a neat tip I learnt over the weekend.

All SQL Server instances are by default set up to use all the memory available on your workstation.

This is ideal when you have SQL Server running on it’s own dedicated server, not so ideal when you have SQL Server installed on your laptop, workstation or even on a SharePoint VM.

Here’s what MSDN says

if SQL Server is one of several server applications running on a single computer, the system administrators may need to control the amount of memory allocated to SQL Server. In these cases, you can use the min server memory and max server memory options to control how much memory SQL Server can use.

In the Server Memory Options page they go on to say:

When you are running multiple instances of the Database Engine, there are three approaches you can use to manage memory

Use max server memory to control memory usage.

Use min server memory to control memory usage.

Do nothing (not recommended).

Which brings us to how we can set the maximum limit. Quite easy. Just connect to each SQL Server instance and set the maximum memory to a more palatable value.

Here’s a visual walk through to limit the maximum memory usage to 512MB for your SharePoint 2010 instance (if you installed it on Windows 7).

1. Start SQL Server Management Studio (or SSMS Express) and connect to your SQL Server instance (SharePoint in this case): localhost\SharePoint

2. Right-click on the instance node and select Properties.

3. Click on the Memory node you’ll notice that the Maximum Server Memory is set to 2,147,483,647MB change it to a lower limit like 256 or 512MB. Click OK and your all set.

If you prefer SQL the same can be done with the following commands.

Enable advanced options:

USE master

EXEC sp_configure 'show advanced options', 1

RECONFIGURE WITH OVERRIDE

Set the maximum amount of memory to 512 MB:

USE master

EXEC sp_configure 'max server memory (MB)', 512

RECONFIGURE WITH OVERRIDE

Display the newly set configuration:

USE master

EXEC sp_configure 'max server memory (MB)'

Set ‘show advanced options’ back to default:

USE master

EXEC sp_configure 'show advanced options', 0

RECONFIGURE WITH OVERRIDE

Feature differences between SharePoint 2007 Enterprise and Standard for a Publishing Portal

2 Replies

I recently had to deploy a site template that was built using SharePoint Enterprise Edition 2007 on an instance of SharePoint Standard Edition 2007.

Obviously given that some features were not available in the Standard Edition I received the ‘The template you have chosen is invalid or cannot be found’. Unlike a MOSS to WSS conversion the problem here is that the features do exist on the server but are simply not available for the standard edition.

I basically resorted to manually comparing the differences between a site template created in the Standard edition vs one created in the Enterprise edition.

Here’s the list if anyone ever needs this.

Remove these features from a template created in the Enterprise edition if you want to deploy it on a Standard edition. Obviously you need to test to ensure that your template is not actually using any of the Enterprise features.
<Feature ID="065c78be-5231-477e-a972-14177cc5b3c7" /> <Feature ID="0806d127-06e6-447a-980e-2e90b03101b8" /> <Feature ID="2510d73f-7109-4ccc-8a1c-314894deeb3a" /> <Feature ID="e8734bb6-be8e-48a1-b036-5a40ff0b8a81" /> <Feature ID="00bfea71-dbd7-4f72-b8cb-da7ac0440130" />

SharePoint 2010 Service Manager

4 Replies

With the final release of SharePoint 2010, I finally had time to brush-up and release the Service Manager that I wrote sometime back when the 2010 betas was released.

This utility is basically akin to the SQL Server Service Manager of yore.

If you have SharePoint 2010 installed on your local Windows 7 workstation then you will definitely come across instances where your workstation suddenly freezes up and everything starts moving in slow motion. The most likely culprit is usually one of the SharePoint services. At other times the SharePoint services simply eat away at your RAM.

That’s where the SharePoint 2010 Service Manager comes into play. It lets you start and stop all the SharePoint Services running on your workstation with a single-click.

This release handles both the full version of SQL Server as well as SQL Express Edition (the SharePoint instance). There is also an option to permanently disable the SharePoint services from starting up when Windows starts up, hopefully leading to faster boot times.

Here are a couple of screenshots. Get the setup file from CodePlex at http://sharepointserviceman.codeplex.com/.

I’d like to thank my colleagues at UniqueWorld including Neil, Rehman and Dougie who tested the first version and gave valuable feedback.

Please do report any issues you find to merill at merill.net

Icons & Illustrations for SharePoint Architecture Diagrams

Installing Office Web Apps on Windows 7

6 Replies

If you haven’t heard of Office Web Apps before it’s basically Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote running inside a browser. It lets you edit documents right within the browser.

A bit of history
You can be forgiven to think that this is all new. The truth is that a skunkworks team within Microsoft built a version of this (code-name NetDocs) way back in 2000 (even before .NET was launched). It is believed that Steven Sinofsky (now head of Windows 7, previously head of Microsoft Office) managed to get this project killed off. Many years down the line Google snagged a lot of the guys from that original team (including the guy who Ballmer threw a chair at).

Back to the Article
Right. Back to our installation. The key document that you need to follow is this Deploy Office Web Apps guide on TechNet.

Pre-Requisites
- The SharePoint 2010 beta needs to be installed
- The documents must be created with the new Office 2010 beta application in order to be editable (you can view all documents but to edit them in the browser you need to at least open and save the .docx using the latest beta of Word/Excel)

Installation
1. Download Office Web Apps from the download centre (here is the direct link). If you couldn’t figure it out the English version is the one named WcServer_en-us.exe

2. Extract the installation and edit the config.xml in order to allow installing on Windows 7. To do this run the following command from the command prompt.

WcServer_en-us.exe /exctact:C:\WCServer

If you have installed SharePoint 2010 on your Windows 7 you will be familiar with what this does.

Now you need to edit the config.xml in extract location and add the following line to \Files\Setup\config.xml just like you did for the SharePoint 2010 install.

That is it. Run setup.exe and follow the rest of the guide in the Deploy Office Web Apps article and you will be able to edit Office documents from within the browser in no time.

NB: I did not have to run any of the PowerShell scripts as the features were all activated. I simply created a new Web Application and uploaded some documents and was able to edit in the browser.

Installing SharePoint Server 2010 on Windows 7