Wednesday, April 15, 2009

WSS search does not work after service account password changes


If you have a SharePoint 2003 version referred to as WSS, and you run into an scenario that search does not work reason being that the service account password expired on Active Directory.

First things first always remember to set the service account a condition to be on password never expires, Incase you miss it by mistake

Now as this happen you should

  • shoot for KB http://support.microsoft.com/kb/934838 which works most of the time


  • stop the Windows SharePoint search service from Central admin page > Operations tab > services on server and start it again proving the new username and password


  • you can try the same from command line, follow article on http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc287997.aspx


  • The last step to try is rebuilding your configuration data base and providing the same service account


  • because earlier when password was changed WSS config database was not updated of the change and it did not recognize the account so no search results appeared


  • After you do the new config database you should run the stsadm –o spsearch –action fullcrawlstart


  • And this will not start immediately you need to give it maximum and hour and then check the performance


  • I am 100% sure this will work !!!!

Saturday, April 11, 2009

Working with Sushi 3.4

Sushi is good to eat and great to work with !!! yes that's true I am talking about the sushi tool available from Codeplex, just to be on record I love Codeplex!! and the tools they are neat and work absolutely gorgeous. ...

Alrighty back to sushi, you can have a look at this little piece at the link http://www.codeplex.com/sushi pretty much info there, but just to list

sushi gives you and option to

Get reports from the site
save your profile images
Perform an stsadm backup with a GUI option to provide the location
Perform an stsadm restore
Send a test email

It also lets you work with lists, like copying view, metadata, bulk list creation, bulk site and column creation

It also lets you apply themes to the site as well as sub sites in one go, now isn't that just awesome...

Sushi is a good took when working with a large creation and deployment on Sharepoint sites and servers good for the view feature.

Thursday, April 9, 2009

STSADM by default in My Command prompt





SharePoint has a lot of programs to be performed on the command prompt as in the GUI in fact after so much interaction with SharePoint product I believe that stsadm is more reliable and faster then the UI, so when ever you have to perform an action on the SharePoint site you open the command prompt and type the command that world knows about

c:\Program Files\common files\Microsoft shared\web server extensions\12\bin

and then you proceed with you list of stsadm commands, but is there an easier way to do it ????.

well of course there is we can add the stsadm path to the hive for command prompt so you can just hit command prompt and run the stsadm commands

>> Copy the path for 12\bin

>> On the SharePoint server(s), go to my computer > Properties and the Advanced Tab

>> Here hit on the button Environment Variables > here you see two frames user variables and system variables, go to system variables

>> Here go to the “PATH” variables and say Edit

>> Here paste the copied url which is c:\Program Files\common files\Microsoft shared\web server extensions\12\bin

>> Say OK and Apply and close

>> Now open command prompt and run stsadm –o help

>> you should be able to see a list of stsadm commands

>> Congrats you just made your life a little easier with SharePoint which is as unusual as pigs got wings ….

Tuesday, April 7, 2009

Traces of portal 2003 on my MOSS site








I just ran into an issue yesterday where,



we have upgraded the environment from Portal 2003 to MOSS 2007 with Gradual upgrade everything is running just fine, but when we try to go into a sub site which has some lists inside it I try to browse through the lists and i find that the lists contain and interface of portal 2003

Just a little background here, the portal 2003 SharePoint site was heavily customized with banner and bread crumbs and quick launch bar, we took out all the customizations before we run the prescan which was successful. then we run the gradual upgrade and this bought the default pages of the site

The issue is I am running into is that the some document libraries still show the SPS2003 Interface. Initially you might think that this is a result of incorrect upgrade, you can try running the command

stsadm –o –upgrade –inplace –url <url of the site> –forceupgrade

If this does not help try resetting site to site definition from the top level site this works in 90% scenarios

I was able to get over the issue with creating a new view on my document libraries and which helped me get rid of the portal 2003 interface

That means when the upgrade was performed the Views did not get updated and sustained the old SPS 2003 look and feel so in short the default views got corrupt and so we have to work around it by creating a new view and replacing the default view.