Discover core databases for a Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 farm

Below are steps for one method to discover databases used by a WSS 3.0 farm. Log in to SharePoint Central Administration for each of these activities.

Configuration Database

1. Go to the “Operations” tab
2. Click “Servers in Farm”
3. Under “Farm Information” see the following items:
   1. Configuration database server
   2. Configuration database name

Central Administration Content Database

1. Go to the “Application Management” tab
2. Click “Web application list”
3. Click “SharePoint Central Administration v3″
4. Under “SharePoint Site Management”, click “Site collection list”
5. Under the root “/” site, look in the information table for the “Database Name” value

General Usage Content Databases

1. Go to the “Application Management” tab
2. Click “Web application list”
3. For each web application listed other than “SharePoint Central Administration v3″ (see above), perform the following:
   1. Click the web application name
   2. Under “SharePoint Site Management”, click “Site collection list”
   3. For each listed site collection (by URL):
      1. Click the URL of the site collection
      2. In the information table, look for the “Database Name” value

Search Database

1. Go to the “Operations” tab
2. Under “Topology and Services”, click “Services on server”
3. Click the text “Windows SharePoint Services Help Search”
4. Under “Search Database”, look for the values:
   • Database Server
   • Database Name

Team Site Search Broken on SharePoint 2003

I realize SharePoint 2003 is fairly old by now, but there are a few production installs out there I’m sure. I still see frequent hits on the account lockout post from awhile back. Here’s a tip from some troubleshooting last fall in case it helps someone else.

We ran into an issue on one of our SPS 2003 installations where the team site information was not searchable at the team site level. We could successfully search all content at the portal/area level, but no results would come back when we performed the same search inside of a team site.

After some troubleshooting with our DBA and Microsoft Support (mostly our DBA), we realized that a required column by SharePoint for indexing the team site content was missing. The column name was Extension.

The resolution for this problem ended up being fairly simple once we figured it out:

1. Open SharePoint Central Administration on the front-end server
2. In the left-hand navigation, click “Windows SharePoint Services”
3. Under “Component Configuration”, click “Configure full-text search”
4. Uncheck “Enable full-text search and index component”
5. Click OK
6. Under “Component Configuration”, click “Configure full-text search”
7. Now re-check “Enable full-text search and index component”
8. Click OK
9. At this point the required column “Extension” should be recreated in the SQL database
10. Force a re-index or wait for the next schedule
11. Test

This fixed the issue for us, and we were able to bring back search results at both the portal and team site level again.

Book Recommendation: MOSS 2007 Best Practices

There are several books that stand-out in my career where the value is well over the $50 spent on the book. Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 Best Practices is definitely one of those books.


P.S. WordPress 2.7 is pretty slick

Hide the Title Field in SharePoint Lists

Sean, my brain-scattered friend up North, found an article on “How to *hide* the TITLE field in SharePoint Lists“. This fit something I wanted to do today, and the tip worked like a champ!

Microsoft apps on VMware ESX will now be supported

Microsoft will now support their applications running on the VMWare ESX platform running version 3.5 update 2. For anyone using both VMWare and Microsoft technologies (like Exchange, SharePoint, etc), this is great news!

Compound conditions and regex in SharePoint Designer workflows

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

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:

• Course 4628: What’s New in Microsoft Office Word 2007
• Course 4625: What’s New in Microsoft Office OneNote 2007
• Course 4624: What’s New in Microsoft Office InfoPath 2007
• Clinic 3199: Getting Started with the 2007 Microsoft Office System (Beta)
• Clinic 3369: Getting Started with Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 (Beta)
• Clinic 5045: Inside Look at Developing with Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services 3.0
• Clinic 3370: Getting Started with Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 (Beta)
• Course 2913: Creating Your First Microsoft ASP.NET 2.0 Web Application
• Course 2915: Working with ADO.NET 2.0 Within Microsoft ASP.NET 2.0 Plus Access to Online Library

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

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

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. (0x8007052e)

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.

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