Ravi Vajaria's Blog

Even after completely deleting the old certificate from IIS 7, my browser still got the old certificate. I came across this post
http://forums.iis.net/t/1163130.aspx

The command “netsh http show sslcert” did show the older certificate (I needed to pay closer look at the ipport and certification hash values).

Issuing “netsh http delete sslcert” deleted the older entry. Restarted IIS and my browser got the new certificate!

There are good discussion threads here and there. I am blogging my version; hopefully to list down the steps easy to follow.

PROBLEM

You see many errors similar to this in the System Event Log (Windows 2008 R2, SharePoint 2007 SP2).

Searching for CLSID 61738644-F196-11D0-9953-00C04FD919C1 in the registry reveals that it is for the service IIS WAMREG admin Service. So you open up the component services locate the IIS WAMREG admin Service and see the properties.

However, there is nothing you can change, everything is grayed out! This is due to a new security measure in Windows 2008 R2.

SOLUTION

We need to first be able to edit the service properties in the component services. Follow along…

Open registry. Locate Computer\HKEY_CLASS_ROOT\AppId\{61738644-F196-11D0-9953-00C04FD919C1}. See permissions.

Note that Administrators don’t have Full Control (TrustedInstaller has). Try allowing full control to Administrators. You will get following message.

(I am assuming you are logged in as an account who is a member of server admin group).

Click on Advanced button in the permissions window. You should see something like below.

From the Owner tab, change the Owner to Administrators. Save your changes. Then allow full control to Administrators. You shouldn’t see “Access is denied” message.

Now close and open the component services, see the properties if service IIS WAMREG admin Service. See that you can now edit!

Give your service account “Local Activation” permissions.

Save your changes! You’re done.

I hope this is helpful to someone…

In lieu of setting up the Kerberos authentication, in SharePoint 2007, I used to edit the BDC Application Definition file to use RevertToSelf authentication mode. I have been doing the same (editing the XML file) in SharePoint 2010 until I found how to do it using the SharePoint Designer. Here is a nice post from LightningTools

This link used to be right under Site Actions drop down in SharePoint 2007.

If you’re reading this in a hope to find out where it is in SharePoint 2010, you bet you’re accessing the right resource. Pull down Site Actions and then Site Settings.

Content and Structure link is under Site Administration section

Enjoy!

• I used it several times and was not sure if I want to run that in the production environment. Everybody at SharePoint Best Practices conference this week anonymously mentioned that NO – DO NOT USE THIS WIZARD IN PRODUCTION. It is the worst practice! It puts a very heavy load on the server unnecessarily. Best is to install Service Applications as we get ready for them and when business needs them.
  
• Best Practices Conference this year was great (today is the post conference day). The sessions were great! Quite informative from the people who are experienced working with SharePoint 2007 and 2010. All instructors were focused on highlighting:
  
• - What is the best practice
  
• - What is the worst practice
  
• - Trade-offs
  

  Fantastic! There were a variety of topics for all – developers, administrators, project managers, IT Pros and so on. We all learn from our trial and error after reading on the technology. Participating in this (or similar) conference gives anyone an opportunity to get familiar with what other people have experienced faster than reading their blogs. This reduces the learning / exploration curve. Don’t do stuff that other experienced people (experts, MVPs, etc) have faced problems with.

  This does not mean all participants would know all nuts and bolts SharePoint 2010. From our experience with during beta, testing, play around, and this conference, we have a pretty good idea how to avoid problematic approaches; and different ways to recover from melt downs.

What are Quick Steps? Quick Steps are easy-to-use one-click buttons which perform multiple actions at once. If you file your mail, they can be a life saver – one click and that conversation is filed away and marked as read. If you send e-mail to the same people over and over – one click and you have a new email to your team. As your work style in Outlook changes, you can configure Quick Steps to work the way you do.

Here is a great post for reference Outlook 2010 – Introducing Quick Steps

I figured there is a quick step available out of the box to create a meeting based on an email, but I thought it would be helpful to be able to create an appointment as well. Here are the steps I followed.

Click “Create New” from Quick Step.

Enter the name of step and choose “Create an appointment with attachment” action

Click Finish.

You’re done. Now whenever you want to block some time off for you to act upon an email, simply open the email and choose “New Appointment” quick step!

I was troubleshooting SharePoint (2007)  Search issue today involving BDC trying to access a stored procedure in Dynamics CRM database. I was able to view the data using BDC Web Parts but the crawler would not crawl any data (and hence, end users would not be able to search

In the end, it narrows down to permissions – sounds simple and it is but at time it gets a bit confusing. Aside from specifying PassThrough/RevertToSelf for authentication user in BDC Application file, Default Content Search account also needs the same permissions. i.e. if default content search account can’t execute the stored procedure, it would not crawl anything! Crawl log actually mentions if this is the case saying either the source data was deleted or access denied.

My intent here is to just shout out that take care of permissions and double check while setting up crawls based on BDC content source. Not to overwhelm with screenshots however it may be useful for beginners (sorry!)

It has been removed in SharePoint 2010 according to Downloadable book: Getting started with SharePoint Foundation 2010. Well, sort of from functionality point of view. The functionality of being able to open the document library in Explorer is still available –

Happy drag-and-drop! You must be able to!

“What is the best way to lock down the final versions of files/documents in SharePoint?”

In SharePoint Server 2007:

• Change the security on each document when you mark them as final. We can automate this process by writing custom code.
• Copy final version of documents to a different document library / folder that tighter security.
• Use SharePoint’s Record Center site (which is difficult to configure and use)

This is now easy in SharePoint 2010:

Declaring documents as records means the documents are final and should not be modified for compliance reasons. In SharePoint 2010, documents can be declared as records in two ways (I am taking the liberty to show these screenshots from Microsoft’s site -  SharePoint 2010 Content Feature Highlights; and I encourage you to see the parts of video you’re interested in)

1. Select one or more documents (yes, you can multi-select documents! and apply actions such as check-in/out) and then declare them as records! Done. these documents cannot be updated. Of course, some pre-configuration is required, but this is quite easy and more importantly out-of-the-box feature from SharePoint 2010

2. Another way is to select the documents and then to send them to a special site called records center site. The documents will be copied to the records center site and links will be displayed in the document library where the documents were originally located. (screenshots not shown… see the video here)

Yesterday Microsoft revealed in SharePoint Conference 2009 that the next version of SharePoint 2010 will be available for public beta (Beta 2) in November 2009! Currently, it is in Beta 1 stage and a number of MSFT customers and partners are reviewing the new version. I can endlessly about the new features and offerings from what I read, but, fortunately I am not going to do it here. Starting points are Microsoft SharePoint Team Blog and this post in particular SharePoint 2010 Resources

One highlight is that Windows SharePoint Services is now going to be called SharePoint Foundation 2010 and going to allow connect to other Line of Business (LOB)Applications. Rings the bell? Yes, that means SharePoint Foundation 2010 can connect to Dynamics CRM and display CRM data on SharePoint Pages. Remember, WSS 3 did not do that… Dynamics CRM team released the CRM List Web Parts for SharePoint. This means building dashboards on new version will likely be easier, compared to almost impossible in WSS 3.

Go ahead and read stuff from the links above while I get our internal environments ready to test our code in the new version and get it ready for 2010!

Thanks for reading this post!