Category: Technology

Reporting Services Error After Creating a SharePoint Site

Published August 23, 2010

I ran into a nasty little problem at a client site this morning. I had just finished setting up Reporting Services on a SharePoint Foundation front end server and everything was working just fine. The client had asked for a central site to store reports by default, so I of course created a new blank subsite called Reports (creative, right?). However, immediately after the site was created, I got this error:

“This operation is not supported on a report server that is configured to run in SharePoint integrated mode. (rsOperationNotSupportedSharePointMode)”

Huh?

That’s a reporting Services error – why am I getting this from SharePoint? Of course I wasn’t. When I had configured Reporting Services, I had also configured the Virtual Directories for the Reporting Services web services, and for the Report Manager, which is unused in Integrated mode. I allowed the default values for both to be used, which are ReportServer and Reports respectively.

That was of course my problem http://servername/Reports was already a valid URL so instead of going to my newly created site, it tried to access the Reporting Services URL, which doesn’t work in integrated mode.

Fixing this was a little bit tricky. The first part was easy, create a site that isn’t named either Reports or ReportServer,and set it up. The tricky part was deleting a site that I couldn’t navigate to. It would be easy with Server,but this was Foundation. SharePoint designer did the trick nicely. With a site open, you can manipulate sites one level down, and I was able to delete the offending site.

The moral of the story? Be aware of existing virtual directory names when creating subsites on the same server.

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SQL Express, Microsoft Internal Database, and SharePoint – Be Careful Upgrading

Published August 16, 2010

Anyone that has worked with SharePoint for some time will tell you that setting it up using the Basic or default install is a big no no. Doing so uses only local accounts, prevents you from adding any additional servers to the farm, and because the SharePoint system account is local, it effectively prevents SharePoint from seeing any data on any other systems. Reversing this requires a complete uninstall of SharePoint. It is much better to do a proper farm install, even if the databases are to be stored on the same machine.

There is however one business case where the basic install has historically been the right approach, and it’s very specific. To explain, a little explanation of some different flavours of SQL is required. Most people are familiar with SQL Server Standard Edition and Enterprise Edition. Also available for download is a free edition of SQL Server entitled SQL Server Express, which has a few limitations, most notably a single database size limit of 4 GB (and has none of the BI components). There is (or was) also a lesser known version of SQL Server known as the Windows Internal Database. It can’t be downloaded, but occasionally will show up on a system when a Microsoft product that requires SQL Server is installed into an environment without an available SQL Server.

What’s the difference between the Windows Internal Database (WID) and SQL Express? SQL Express is a little easier to manage (and possible to uninstall, unlike WID). WID is relatively invisible, but the major difference between the two is the size restriction. Microsoft will often change the maximum DB size limit for the WID in the interest of the product that it is backing. This is very much true of SharePoint 2007. Given SharePoint’s focus on storing large content,Microsoft didn’t want people to bump into that 4 GB size restriction too quickly,so for WSS 3.0 (the free version of SharePoint 2007), they removed the limit completely.

This means that if you use WSS 3.0, and you install using the basic configuration option, you have no licensing limits on the amount of content that you can store within SharePoint. It is very important to note that this is ONLY true of WSS 3.0, if you install SharePoint Server 2007 in basic mode, once you hit 4 GB everything stops working. Also, if you decide that maybe you should do a best practice farm install, and you install SQL Express separately from SharePoint, you will run into that 4 GB wall with either WSS or SharePoint server.

This then is the one business case where it is appropriate to use the basic installation. If the feature set of WSS 3.0 is adequate, and you will want to store more than 4 GB in a single site collection, basic installation is for you.

Thus far I’ve been addressing WSS 3.0 and SharePoint Server 2007. With SharePoint Foundation 2010, and SharePoint Server 2010, Microsoft made some significant changes to the model. Now, they exclusively rely on SQL Express for the basic installation. While this is great for anyone that’s ever wanted to uninstall an instance of the Windows Internal Database, Express has that 4 GB limit for both editions, which essentially means that they’ve closed the door on the free storage ride.

This also means that if you are in this category of organizations using more than 4 GB of SharePoint storage, you’re going to need to spring for a SQL Server license if you want to upgrade to SharePoint Foundation 2010. You will also need to do an uninstall, and a reinstall to get yourself into a farm configuration. It’s OK, it’s not as scary as it sounds.

The SharePoint 2010 changes mean that there is now no good reason to use basic installation in a production environment. Development or testing, OK, but why not use farm in that scenario as well? It more closely approximates the real world.

UPDATE – 24/08/201

I was listening to Todd Klindt’s Admin Netcast #53 today, and he was addressing some of the above issues. He brought up two very good related points. Firstly, in SQL Express 2008 R2, the storage limit has been increased to 10 GB, so that might help you out. Also, you can use the SQL FileStream Remote Blob storage to help get the size of your content database down.

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License State Error Joining a SharePoint 2010 Server to an Existing Farm

Published August 7, 2010

I ran into an interesting error this week at a client site. They had been having server trouble, and that involved setting up a new instance of the operating system, and obviously all of the SharePoint bits needed to be reinstalled. Once that was done, I ran the Products and Technologies configuration wizard, set it to join an existing farm, entered the farm credentials and everything was good until Step 3 – where it connects to the configuration database. At that point it choked with:

“The license state for the current server doesn’t match the farm’s license state.”

My first impulse was that I had used the wrong key when installing the bits. Trying to join an Enterprise farm with a Standard server, or vice versa could cause this, but I was able to confirm that I had used the right key.

After a fair bit of head scratching, I realized that I had committed the mistake that I always commit with 2010, and I had forgotten to install the Office Web Applications. I had indeed installed them on the farm, and the rebuilt server did not yet have it installed. After installing them, I was happy to see that the server joined the farm successfully.

What Domain Accounts to Use For SharePoint 2010

Published August 6, 2010

When setting up a SharePoint farm, whether 2007 or 2010, you have the option of providing various service identities throughout the process. Indeed, every application can run with its own identity. Far too often, administrators pick a single account, and use it for everything. While this is certainly the easiest approach, it is far from the most secure, and it can be very limiting down the road if you need to get granular with your permissions. The trouble is that there are a lot of intricacies as to what account does what, and getting it right requires a pretty comprehensive understanding of the product.

We now have enough work under our belt with SharePoint 2010 that I feel comfortable sharing some of our best practices around account creation for SharePoint 2010. The product itself has gotten more complex, and so therefore have the configuration options. There is no “one size fits all” approach for all scenarios, but the list that I am providing below should work as a good starting point. There is often a trade-off between the ease of manageability and providing good security, and the approach below,I feel,find a good balance.

The chart below describes the account, its purpose, what rights it needs to the local machines in the farm (including the SQL server machine(s), the rights it needs for SQL Server directly, and the rights it needs to the Active Directory domain.

Base Set of SharePoint 2010 Service Accounts

Account	Purpose	Local Rights	SQL Rights	Domain Rights
spSetup	Used to login to the farm servers Used to install bits on the farm servers	Administrator Remote Desktop Login	DB Creator Security Admin	Member
spFarm	Identity for all Windows Services Identity for all SQL Services (optional) Identity for Profile Synchronization Service Identity for all code running with elevated permissions (web parts)	None ⁽¹⁾⁽³⁾	DB Creator Security Admin	Member
spApps	Identity for all SP Application App Pools ⁽⁴⁾	None	None	Member
spServices	Identity for all SP Service Applications⁽⁴⁾	None	None	Member
spUPS	Identity for the User Profile Service	None	None	Member Replicating Directory Changes⁽²⁾
spCrawl	Used by the Indexer to crawl content	None	None	Member⁽⁵⁾
spBI	Trusted account for Reporting Services and PerformancePoint when not using Kerberos	None	DB Access as appropriate	Member
spSuperUser	Used for Object Caching	None	None	Member
spSuperReader	Used for Object Caching	None	None	Member

(1) Needs to be a part of the Local Administrators group while the User profile service is being created. See my previous post for more details. Once created, this account can be removed.

(2) AD Permission required by the User Profile service

(3) Required for a specific AD container when using the incoming email service. See this post for details on how.

(4) There may be a large number of these, one per entity

(5) Appropriate rights will need to be granted to this account for any EXTERNAL content being crawled (file system, shared folder, Lotus Notes, etc)

Hopefully this will help a few of you get started with a little less head scratching.

Windows Live Essentials “Wave 4” And Windows Phone 7 – Why You Should Care

Published July 23, 2010

A few weeks ago Microsoft made available the latest Beta version of Live Essentials. Most people I know use Windows Live Messenger (formerly MSN Messenger), and that’s all that Windows Live is to them. However, it’s much more than that. If you’ve installed Windows 7, you may have noticed that it no longer ships with a number of productivity applications (for example Movie Maker), All of the missing applications are available through Windows Live. There is a big difference though, in that these applications are all very much “Live Aware”, which is to say that they’re tightly coupled with your Windows Live profile and Live ID. I’ll dive into why that’s a good thing below.

To start with, Essentials Wave 4 consists of 9 Primary Components:

Messenger – This is of course the one most are familiar with. However, it’s very much new and improved, and I’ll talk about this in a bit more detail below.
Photo Gallery – Photo Gallery is the Microsoft application for organizing, tagging and cleaning up photos. This, to me is the absolute standout product of the suite,and I’ll explain why below
Mail – This replaces Windows Mail,which no longer ships with Windows. It allows you to hook in multiple email boxes (of course Hotmail is one option). If you currently use Outlook, you likely won’t use this, but it does work well, and it’s free for the non Office users.
Movie Maker – This application allows you to put together pictures and videos into a video presentation. It’s rudimentary (I personally use Premiere Pro from Adobe – but that’s WAY overkill for most users, not to mention difficult). It’s easy, slick, and will do the job in most cases.
Writer – This is the best blog authoring tool that I’ve come across. I’m using it right now to write this. It can author blog content for a very wide variety of blog providers, and this version brings in the (now) familiar ribbon interface. Connecting to Flickr, YouTube, Facebook, etc is an absolute snap now, as it benefits from the new integrated features of your Live profile.
Family Safety – From the site: “Manage and monitor your children”s Internet activity so they can surf the web more safely”. I personally don’t use it, so I have no comment, but it’s there.
Bing Toolbar – I hate toolbars – they’re allowed nowhere near my PC. If you like them, I’m sure this one is wonderful, but I wouldn’t know.
Messenger Companion – This is a little plug in to IE that lets you know when any of your friends share a link (they don’t need to be Messenger or Live friends). It’s also a quick way of sharing a page that you happen to be viewing.
Sync – If you’ve ever hear of Live Mesh, this is it. This allows you to take a folder on your PC, and keep it synchronized with a SkyDrive folder and/or a folder on another PC that you may use. This works seamlessly in the background, and is excellent for sharing with teams, working with multiple computers, or just making sure that you always have access to current data wherever you are. It is however limited to 2 GB, which to me, is pretty low. I would expect to see that increased in the future. SkyDrive itself allows for 25 GB, so why can’t I use some of that allocation?

These applications are great, in and of themselves, but the real power lies with their tight integration with your live account, and correspondingly, its tight integration with other social networks. Windows Live is Microsoft’s consumer facing social networking offering, but they seem to have taken a different approach than you may have expected from them in the past. They know that they’ll never get as many subscriptions as Facebook, and that the value of a network lies primarily with the number of its nodes, so they seem to have taken an “embrace, not replace strategy. Sure, all of the basic social network capabilities are there, a friends list, news feed, photos, etc. However if your friends use Facebook, no problem – we’ll just incorporate them. MySpace? Flickr, Linked in? No problem, they’ll come in too, and you get one big friends list, and feed that is relatively source agnostic.

Windows Messenger hooks right into that list. So now, instead of a relatively dead list of names, here’s what the new Messenger screen looks like:

You can seen that your friends news feed is there, from every network that you are connected to. You can update your status, which again gets broadcast to all connected networks. You have access to all of your Live content via the Social menu at the top, and all of your friends are brought in on the right, and if they use Live Messenger, you can see their status or initiate an IM session, just like you used to.

Another stand out application is the new Photo Gallery. Yes it gets the nice ribbon interface, but it’s got a few VERY nice features. I’ve always struggles with getting my photos tagged with people efficiently (I’m currently working with a base of about 10,000 pictures), but this makes it a snap. Photo Gallery contains built in facial recognition algorithms, so that it can detect that a picture has faces in it, and that they need to be tagged. It will then extract the faces, and prompt you for who those people are.

Where does the list of available people come from? Why your amalgamated friends list of course. One interesting thing to note is that internally, if your friends names are slightly different between networks, it maintains an internal map to keep everything straight, so when you post to pictures to Facebook for example, users are all tagged correctly.

The real power though comes from the fact that not only does it recognize faces, it recognizes particular faces. Once you tag the same name a few times, the software can offer suggestions, if you go into batch people tagging mode

The recognition is amazing, and while not perfect, it nails it most of the time. It’s interesting to see it recognize the same face over a number of ages, or to see it get confused by look alike relatives.

Tagging is a breeze this way, and all of the tags are respected when sending to any of the social networks. Which networks? Well, any of the ones that you have linked your Live profile to that support pictures. You can really see the power of the integration features here, and the addition of another service will only bring that much more value to th
e platform. This is the beauty of the embrace not replace philosophy. Windows Live is really a solid social mashup platform, filling in gaps where any exist.

To take it one step further, Microsoft will be introducing its new Windows Phone 7 platform later this year. It promises to be an innovative product that changes the way we work with our content, and the way that your personal and business lives integrate. Many of the same concepts discussed above apply to the way that the Windows Phone 7 operates, and its primary means of integration will be your Windows Live profile. Paul Thurott of the SuperSite for Windows is currently writing a book on Windows Phone 7, and has shared his experiences of working with a development prototype. Simply logging in with your Windows Live ID brings all of the content discussed above right down to your phone, no muss, no fuss.

I don’t think that the new Live features, and the new Phone capabilities are a coincidence.I really like what I see developing in this space, and I’m very excited about trying out one of these new phones as soon as I can. In the meantime though, I have a few photos to tag and to post.

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