Compound conditions and regex in SharePoint Designer workflows

Posted on May 19, 2008, under SharePoint.

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The Microsoft SharePoint Designer Team Blog has some good tips on incorporating compact and powerful conditions in your workflows. I’ve loved using Regular Expressions in the past - they are so powerful for string matching - and I’m really glad to see it can be used in SharePoint Designer workflows.

If you need a little help putting together some of your own regex magic, try out the Regex Coach.

Free Microsoft online training courses

Posted on January 23, 2007, under Web Dev/Tech.

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Microsoft has a Learning site, where you can sign up for different topic areas in their learning catalog. Many of the courses have a registration cost associated with them. However, there are quite a few courses Microsoft makes available for free.

Some of the free courses that caught my interest were:

Their learning manager interface is pretty nice. It keeps track of the courses you have registered for, and even your progress inside those courses. You can stop a course, come back to it later, and pick up in the section you left off.

If you use any Microsoft software, and feel like you have room to sharpen up a bit, you might check out the Learning site and see if there are any free courses available that you can register for.

Super easy SharePoint RSS/ATOM reader

Posted on October 6, 2006, under Web Dev/Tech.

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I happened to stumble upon George Tsiokos’ Windows SharePoint Services RSS (WSS-RSS) RSS/ATOM reader today - awesome! His use of XLST to convert RSS feeds to a native Windows SharePoint Services DataViewWebPart (DWP) file makes it possible for any Portal or Team Site administrator to add RSS feeds to their SharePoint pages.

You don’t even need to download a utility! Just use the form on his blog post to generate the DWP file that you use to import into SharePoint as a WebPart. The whole process takes seconds.

Thanks George!!

SharePointPS Search Service locking out the service user account

Posted on March 30, 2006, under Web Dev/Tech.

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I decided to change the password on a service account we are using to run one of our SharePoint Portal 2003 instances to make it a little more secure. However, while I was in the process of restarting everything, the user account got locked out! It kept getting locked out as I did testing, and apparently it looked like I had left the wrong password somewhere. I went back and checked all the places I had changed the account password:

  • Services: SharePoint related
  • Services: SQL Server related
  • IIS App Pools
  • I even peeked inside SQL Server to see if I missed something there

I changed the password in those locations several times, but the account kept getting locked out. Argh! I finally was able to track down that the account locking seemed to happen after starting the “Microsoft SharePointPS Search” service. From there, with the help of our Windows Administrator, we were able to track down enough to find the solution.We noticed that the first issue in the event log when this happened was the following error:

Event Type: Error
Event Source: Microsoft SharePointPS Search Service
Event Category: Gatherer
Event ID: 3028
Description:
The gatherer object cannot be initialized.

Context: http:/// Application, Autocat_train$$$ Catalog

Details: Logon failure: unknown user name or bad password. (0×8007052e)

I used some of that information to do some searching around, and came upon a newsgroup posting that solved the problem for me. Apparently the old password must stay cached in SharePoint if the username doesn’t change. At least this appears to be the issue. So per the leading of the newsgroup post, I took the following actions to fix the problem - which I’ll write in present tense in case someone else is trying to fix this issue:

  1. Add another Login to the SQL server with the Server Roles of “Database Creator” and “Security Administrator“
  2. Open up SharePoint Central Administration
  3. Under Server Configuration, click Configure Server Farm Account Settings
  4. Change both the accounts for “Configuration Database Administration” and “Default Content Access” to be the new account that was added to SQL.
  5. After the user change is made, run a Full Import search on both Portal and Non-Portal content in SharePoint. I’m not sure this step is necessary, but I went ahead and did it for good measure.
  6. Once SharePoint sucessfully re-indexes using the new account, go back to the Configure Server Farm Account Settings, and change the user accounts back to the desired service account - with the new password.
  7. After the account change, once again re-index your content.

Once I had taken all those steps, everything ran great! No more account lockout, and the SharePoint world is up and running well.