SharePoint Infrastructure Upgrade - whoops - sharepoint

I applied the MOSS infrastructure upgrade w/o applying the WSS one before it -- uh, help!

Quoting:
Infrastructure Update for Microsoft Office Servers (KB951297)
Other Relevant Updates It is strongly recommended that you install the Infrastructure Update for Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 (KB951695) before installing this update on any of the Office Servers listed in the system requirements section above.
Therefore not applying first Infrastructure Update for WSS seem to be not recommended but not unsupported

I believe that is a supported, but unrecommended configuration. You should be able to get help from microsoft :)

I am assuming that you have also run the Configuration wizard after you applied this and brought your system online? If you have not, you are in a much better position, as you can apply the WSS upgrade - then run the wizard and you should be fine.
If you have run through the wizard - and brought the system back online - its not the end of the world. What you will want to do - is go back and follow the steps to upgrade your system just as if you had not done anything. The infrastucture update makes some significant changes and improvements to portal search - so once you start trying to configure that, you'll see some errors in crawling etc - as the indexer (which has been updated) tries to crawl content (which has not).
Apply the WSS bits, then reapply the bits for MOSS, then run the Config wizard and bring everything back. You should be okay at that point.
Obviously, before you do anything, backup all systems and take them offline.
Hope this helps.

Sounds like time for a full restore. The MOSS upgrade steps did explicitly ask for a restore, didn't it?

The TechNet article Install the Infrastructure Update for Microsoft Office Servers (Office SharePoint Server 2007) has a dicussion on this in the community content section. Someone commented that the WSS update must be run first. There is no suggestion for what to do if you don't or what the consquences are.

Related

Sharepoint 2010 - feature not appearing in UI

Does anyone here know what could cause a new feature to not show up in the SharePoint UI?
The solution it is part of has been correctly deployed to the GAC and shows up in the central administration list of deployed farm solutions, the feature appears in the FEATURES folder of the 14 hive, yet the feature itself does not appear in the features list for the site collection, either in the UI or in PowerShell using Get-SPFeature.
Yes, the feature is correctly scoped, and no, it is not hidden. :)
Any thoughts or pointers would be very welcome!
Answer supplied on sharepoint.stackexchange.com, with thanks to Simon Doy. https://sharepoint.stackexchange.com/questions/73871/sharepoint-2010-feature-not-appearing-in-ui
Somehow, something had gone wrong with the installation of the feature, and neither the UI nor commands like Get-SPFeature revealed its existence, although the Install-SPFeature -ScanForFeatures command emboldened below displayed the missing feature.
"Check that the feature has been installed. For example, if you are
performing Update-SPSolution and a new feature has been added between
solution deployments then the feature is not installed by default.
To check do the following:-
Run SharePoint 2010 Management Shell from one of the SharePoint
servers Type Install-SPFeature -ScanForFeatures This will show you any
features that are available in the SharePoint Root but have not been
installed. You can install any missing features using the command :-
Install-SPFeature -AllExistingFeatures
See the following TechNet
Article for more information.
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff607825(v=office.14).aspx"
Look in central admin to see what site collection the feature is deployed to. Make sure in that site collection the feature is turned on.
Also, check the deploy job status to see if it actually finished.
Is there a on install event receiver? If it errors out, the feature will not finish installing even after the DLL is copied.

How to mirror Sharepoint 2007 site?

I'm not sure if this should be posted here or over superuser, but how does one go about mirroring a Sharepoint 2007 site? I have admin access, and the mirror doesn't need to be nice and pretty; it just needs to be presentable and readable. Also, I need all the shared docs to be copied as well.
We use to have WinHTTrack to mirror the Sharepoint, but that broke a few months ago due to some of our recent security changes. I tried the username#password:domain method but that resulted no luck.
It depends a little bit on how and where you want to mirror it.
If you have a separate SharePoint farm (even a single server - one tier - farm), you can rely on backup / restore, export / import or content deployment to have another copy up and running that will be a mirror of the existing one.
If you want an offline version, depends on what kind of content you need (collaboration stuff ?) you can use Microsoft Groove 2007 that offers an offline mode for some of the targeted data.
I've found this great tool that can mirror the SP site for cheap: http://www.metaproducts.com/OEPR.html
If WinHTTrack did satisfy you, why not just fix it?
There are solutions around the web to have WinHTTrack work with NTLM authentication: http://forum.httrack.com/readmsg/7513/index.html
However the download link seems to be broken (geocities..), but you could try to search for NTML proxy solutions and try to setup your own.

What is the best way to create SharePoint 2010 copy?

I'm looking for a way to duplicate the content of a SharePoint 2010 server in order to work against it without taxing the main (production) server. I would need the backup server to update as needed, but I'm not looking for a failover solution. It looks like 2010 includes replication features for failover, but I can't tell if this is appropriate for my solution as well (simply not configuring the switchover feature). Can someone with SP 2010 experience tell me if this feature would work for my needs?
You could attach a restored backup of your production content database. See this MSDN documentation for more info: Attach or detach content databases (Sharepoint Server 2010).
There is also a GUI tool http://sushi.codeplex.com/ which should help you. You could backup production and restore to dev site whenever you needed to.
You could also use either stsadm.exe and the backup/restore option OR the powershell cmd backup/restore.
In addition, there is a built in interface in Central Admin to backup/restore sites. I've generally found either the command line or the SUSHI tool to be quicker and easier.
In most cases, the taxing work is on the sharepoint side, not the SQL side. You could attach another front end to the farm but reserve it for only your traffic. Otherwise you're looking at some form of backup/restore to copy everything to a 2nd duplicate farm.

Holding Page during SharePoint Upgrade?

We'll be upgrading a client's MOSS public internet site soon from a Cumulative Update to SP2 and are conscious that there will be downtime (to perform the upgrade and possibly troubleshooting!). We would like to add a holding page so that visitors still get access to key contact details and a message that the site is under maintenance.
Does anyone have any tips for doing this type of thing with SharePoint? I know of the app_offline.htm file that when dropped into the web root, will automatically prevent access to the rest of the site but wasn't sure if this was standard practice in the SharePoint world?
Any tips?
Cheers, James.
If the app_offline.htm works for you, then by all means, use it.
I think that it will the best option for you, and to the best of my knowledge SharePoint doesn't have any other means of putting itself offline.
As this is a public intranet site you are updating, presumably there is already a test environment for it that is close or the same in configuration. It is important to follow exactly the same steps for updating the test environment as you would for production. These should be documented as well and followed to the letter to reduce the likelihood of mistakes. This way you are much less likely to run into problems.
I would try app_offline.htm as you suggest (like Magnus I don't believe there is another way to take SharePoint offline). If your test environment updates with this in place you should be fine.

What is your code maintenance strategy for custom SharePoint assemblies?

How do you handle improvements and added functionality to your existing SharePoint code?
Did you deploy your original code as a feature?
Do you create a new feature_V2 and deactivate the original?
What processes have you found that led to problems in the future?
I am specifically interested about WebParts, EventHandlers, and WorkFlows.
From what I can find, MS did not leave a "Best Practices" around updating existing code. (Actually, I'm not sure they left a "Practice" much less a "Best Practices")
You can see other questions around this topic:
how-to-upgrade-a-long-running-sharepoint-workflow-already-in-production
how-to-update-spitemeventreceiver-assembly-version-for-a-list-in-sharepoint
should-i-keep-solutions-and-features-in-a-1-1-ratio
What is your method?
I understand this question may be subjective, but I feel there is a large information gap surrounding this area of SharePoint development.
Thank you,
Keith
We always deploy custom code as features and solutions. When it is time to upgrade the existing code, all you have to do is stsadm -upgradesolution and everything works very nicely. I do not like the idea of having feature_v2 type features around...it makes it extremely difficult to keep track of the current version. I think you should only have one version of each feature in your production environment.
Leave the version control to your source control system.
I'm working at a shop that does a lot of SharePoint development. You want to deploy by feature with a solution package. You can easily upgrade your features as you go along and you will need to upgrade the solution package. This solution package can be created from a TFS Build server with WSPBuilder. As you along, the only thing left is to upgrade the solution and "Force" reactivate your feature to have the new feature of the feature.
Don't forget to do an IIS reset for any new code deployment that is done through the GAC. If you put anything inside like sitemaps and resources inside your 12, you will want to do a stsadm -o copyappbincontent.
If you deploy features that contain application files, you want to unload your application on ALL servers of the farm. It can easily be done by putting an App_Offline.htm at the root of every application on every machine.
When completed, remove App_Offline.htm (or rename it) and you are done. Your site is back online.

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