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.

Office DevCon 2007. Sydney, Australia 3rd-4th Nov 2007. Will you be there?

How about a free two day Office Developer Conference?

Check out the details quickly and register before they run out of space.

Another MOSS Site goes public

I know, it's just an out of the box site, but that's the point. With MOSS you can have a good looking fully content managed site up within a day or two. Obviously most of the time getting the content right takes a bit longer ;-) so we are still working on that.

Check out www.SoftwareObjectives.com.au .

Mossig September meeting: Enterprise Search Extravaganza

26th Sept 2007 at 5:30pm
To register for this meeting please email register@mossig.net by COB Tuesday 25th September 2007.

This month MOSSIG will be presenting a series of Enterprise Search related topics, so come along and find out how Enterprise Search can help you unlock your businesses data and improve productivity.

Show and Tell Session
Contact Selector Control in InfoPath (Ben Walters)
• Microsoft Office InfoPath

Ben Walters from Strategic Data Management will be providing a brief overview of the Contact Selector control available in InfoPath 2007.

Business Session
Search possibilities in your Enterprise (Tim Wragg)
• Windows SharePoint Services • Microsoft Office SharePoint Server

According to IDC (Content Technologies Study 2004-2005), workers spend 9.5 hours per week searching. Join Tim Wragg from Professional Advantage as he discusses the Enterprise Searching capabilities of SharePoint 2007 and what it means for business.
The presentation will include,
· positioning of the current search landscape from desktop to the web and where its going,
· search features including documents, people, business data and other sources,
· tips and tricks for an effective implementation , and
· the gotcha’s in features and licensing.

Technical Session
How to access and search business data (Matthew Cosier)

• Microsoft Office Project Server 2007 • Windows SharePoint Services
• Microsoft Business Data Catalog Definition Tool

In this half-hour session Matthew Cosier from Readify will step you through the means of integrating external data with the Business Data Catalog, and exposing it via search. In particular he will take you through the process of writing a BDC web service, generating the application definition using the new Microsoft Business Data Catalog Definition Editor tool, and finally exposing the data to SharePoint search.

Are you into VSTO 2005 Development?

If you are you may want to update your VSTOR. As I understand it has been updated with support for Office 2003 and 2007 under Vista but there isn't much detail on what was added and fixed "This version is a July 2007 update that contains enhancements and bug fixes to the original VSTO 2005 SE runtime; for example, it contains fixes related to add-in support for Microsoft Office Outlook." is all the doc that comes with it.

Note that there are two different updates, one for design time (adds support for VS 2008!) and the VSTOR itself.

Design time update

Runtime update

Also updated are the instructions for deployment of VSTO Solutions on MSDN:

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb332051.aspx

While you are in VSTO mode you may also want to watch this video of Steve Fox and Paul Stubbs on OBA and VSTO they made at Tech-Ed 2007.

Office Development News

I'm normally not posting about other Blog posts but these are hot and very important to those of use in the realm of Office Business Applications. So here I go:

The first one is about the release of both a new MOSS SDK as well as a WSS SDK.

"The latest and greatest MOSS SDK release just went LIVE with an exciting new tool: The BDC Application Definition Editor! This tool abstracts the way you create entities in the Application Definition File by giving you an easy to use UI. "

Read more here. And make sure you scroll down to read everything.

The second one is by one of my favorite MS-Bloggers Erika Erhli, she's got a great post on my favorite subject, creating documents programmatically.
Excellent stuff, thanks Erika!

Lasty, make sure you are subscribed to the OBA team Blog as they continue to produce high level documentation and case studies about how Office System is and can be used.