Not how you want to start your Monday

So there I was minding my business and getting my coffee; I walked into my Office and I got a "Good Morning, we have a problem 'our SharePoint sites are down....'".

We got 404 errors on all our sites. After some interrogation tactics I found out one of my colleagues was in on Sunday and decided to run all security patches on the servers and go for the re-start. After that everything was black, so I started digging into event logs and log files. I noticed entries about SharePoint not being able to access the content database and schema inconsistency after running the configuration wizard. (we didn’t run that wizard but it seems some update did).

After some googling I decided to try:

Stsadm –o upgrade –inplace –url http://<...>

And that brought everything back!, Pfffff, earned myself another cuppa. And I will make sure that backup can be restored when I need it.

Have a good week!

Ed

Outlook Add-in and SharePoint: Getting Started

As some of you might know I was involved with the CA Visual Objects community in a previous life. "VO" as we passionately call it is a Win-32 bit environment with good OO-support and an xBase (Clipper) background, somewhat like Visual Foxpro. And soon there will even be a .net version called Vulcan!

In the VO forum I was requested to write some articles about how to save e-mail into SharePoint. So I've done some research and came up with a few really basic articles that explain how to create an Add-in for Outlook 2007 using VSTO 2005 SE, how to save items to SharePoint, how to add context menu items etc. All in C#.

The articles are posted here: http://www.softwareobjectives.com.au/VoConversion/Article%20Archive/Forms/HomePage.aspx (this is Part I and II, more to follow soon). The objective of the articles is to keep the code limited to a few lines, each time expanding a bit more. The first deals with how to hook up event handlers and save send mail to SharePoint automatically, the second how to add a context menu item and save incoming mail manually. Next I will add some info on how to process multiple Items, introducing the new Table/SQL queries for Outlook, add dialogs on Save and set item properties so that mail can be 'tagged' for the correct client, staffmember, order or whatever kind of context you would like to add.

If you have any questions or requests of other functionality you would like to know about just leave a comment.