Infrastructure Update for MOSS

The update story................

MS released the infrastructure update for MOSS and WSS on 17th July 2008,

The update applies to the following products

Microsoft SharePoint server 2007
Microsoft Project server 2007
Microsoft Search Server 2008
Microsoft Search Server 2008 Express

Article to Download is http://support.microsoft.com/?id=951695 for WSS 3.0 and http://support.microsoft.com/?id=951547 for MOSS 2007, like The service packs that we install for WSS and MOSS we gonna follow the same procedure with the Infrastructure updates as well,
It is recommended that you install the WSS SP1 before you install the infrastructure update for WSS
And also install the WSS SP1 + MOSS SP1 before you install it for MOSS.
The update requires no reboot and does not makes any registry changes, remember to stop World Wide Web Publishing service (W3SVC) just to make sure the users are disconnected and the services are stopped before you start installing the update, the version of the SharePoint site changes to 12.0.6318.5000 after installation of the update, which can be verified from services on server link under Operation in CA or from the dbo.version of the Configuration databases.

What is Infrastructure Update?

Infrastructure update will be adding the functionalities to the SharePoint which was not originally shipped with the product.
These contain the Search server 2008 and the Search server Express, so if you have a full version of SQL the full version of Search server will be added and if you are existing with express edition (Basic install), you will have to settle with the express edition, I am assuming that the search server does not install its own SSEE but adds to the existing version of SSEE that you use for SharePoint (that means even if you use Search server on a Standalone install of MOSS it needs to be installed as a full version of Search server as it has to connect to the existing SQL databases nywas…..)
There are several Content Deployment updates shipped with the Infrastructure update as well, we will talk about the issues that it fixes for content deployment as well.
There is an Infrastructure update for Project server 2007 as well KB 951547 which is supposed to include several usability and performance updates for the Project server.
Alrighty, coming back to my favorite Search Server 2008 let’s see what’s in Infrastructure update for us,

How does the Infrastructure benefit my Search?

Ok, as we have been talking a lot about the Search server and how it is beneficial to our everyday search needs, here is what infrastructure update has to offer. Once you complete running the PS config wizard after installing the update and launch the Central Administration page you will notice that you see a new link Search Administration under Search Settings In the SSP (before… it showed only search settings and Search usage Reports). Now this is the page where you have all the options to control search, Crawls, schedule, describe content source and all the regular stuff, which can all be found together at a page so this feature is called a unified administration Dashboard

Besides all this it also does adds Federated Search to your Search administration page, Federated search is a method to obtain the results for a keyword from another Search engine and gives you results for it, it is all done with help of a web part which is configured to use the same query and fetch results from the web it can be Google, yahoo search and other search engines too.
When you create a new search page (after the update is installed) you can stop a federated web part configured by default, which pulls up the results from the Live.com, pretty cool must say….
In case you wanna learn how do you set federation on the Search page you can have a look into the video Federation of Search.


How will infrastructure help me in Content Deployment?

The infrastructure update address many top reported issues with the content deployment I am just copy – pasting them from the original site

Incremental bug fixes:
> Incremental import can fail if a feature with a custom content type has been reactivated on the destination.

> Unpublished pages do not get unpublished on the destination.

> Reinheriting permissions on the source does not propagate incrementally.

> Deleting a permission level on the source causes a "Permission level cannot be found." exception during incremental import.

> Incremental behavior with the Recycle Bin improved. Incremental import fails with a "FatalError: You cannot perform this action on a checked out document." exception.
"Violation of PRIMARY KEY constraint" error during export.

> Document "Title" field does not get deployed by incremental deployment in some cases.
In some cases, making permissions changes on the source or destination will result in a "The specified name is already in use." error.

> Deleting or renaming an item then creating one with the same name causes incremental deployment to fail.

> Incremental deployment fails when pages have independent permission settings.

> Deleting a file and folder can cause incremental deployment to fail in some cases.

Other bug fixes:
Removing a User from a group does not propagate to the destination during incremental deployment.

Some source web settings related to search are not propagated to the destination.

Content Deployment can time out incorrectly on large deployment jobs.

Miscellaneous SQL deadlocks.

Quick deployment jobs behave incorrectly when Variations is used.

Quick deployment fails when pages are Quick Deployed while the Quick Deploy job is running.

Running One-time jobs manually can fail.

In some cases, a content deployment job can get stuck in a "Preparing" state forever.

Deployment sometimes unghosts items that are ghosted on the source.

Custom master page settings on the source are not propagated to the destination during deployment.

Content deployment fails when compression is disabled.


Now there is one more point that I need to showcase here
“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. “ see http://support.microsoft.com/kb/951695

This means that the alternate access mappings might break or the configured url might become unresponsive after installation so we need to make sure that we test the mappings before and after the install.