TSB's Road to SharePoint 2010 [Part 2]

I have finally came to the conclusion that the Database Attach upgrade was the best way to go. Our current solution is running on a 32-bits infrastructure, and going would an in-place upgrade to SharePoint 2010 would mean having to do both a hardware, and a software upgrade on the box. We have already been able to prove that the Database Attach option was working as expected, and therefore this blog serie will strictly focus on this upgrade methodology.

Couple of things I've noted when doing the upgrade:

One of our content database (we have a total of 12) was added correctly to the farm, but when looking at the Manage Content Database screen in Central Administration, its status stayed at "Upgrading" for days. Removing it and re-attaching it back to the farm didn't fix the error either. Looking at the Upgrade log, I saw that SharePoint complained about Excel Services not being available. That automatically ring a bell that there must have been something wrong with the Entreprise features on the farm. What I ended up doing to get this fix is have it first removed from the farm. Then in Central Administration, under the "Upgrade and Migration" section, I opened the Enable Features on existing sites, and selected the option to enable the entreprise features on all sites. This enabled the SharePoint 2010 Entreprise feature at the Web Application. Once that was done, re-adding the content database worked like a charm.

Then, the second hickup I encountered was that another of our content database gave an error at about 27% progress when trying to add it to the farm. The error returned back was the following:

"Could not find stored procedure 'dbo.proc_LogChange'."

Reading different articles on the web, this error seems to indicate that some content in the DB was still being actively used. I simply deleted the database and restored its backup copy and voilà, I was able to add it back to the farm successfully.

TSB's Road to SharePoint 2010

It's official, I have started working on the Transportation Safety Board of Canada strategy to migrate their SharePoint 2007 intranet platform over to SharePoint 2010. TSB's SharePoint environment is highly customized, and development best practices have not been followed in many areas. This blog serie is intended to describe and related all steps undertaken by our organization to upgrade our platform to 2010. Hopefully it will save somebody else the trouble of figuring out how to upgrade their own customized SharePoint environment.

Before I get started, here's a bit of background info as to where our organization stands. Since 2005, the TSB has been leveraging the SharePoint plas a case management system to manage investigation related materials. In April 2010, the platform was migrated over to a MOSS 2007 server. It was decided at the time that an in-place upgrade was not feasible, and that it was better to build a new server completely, and develop a custom tool to migrate all existing information over. Some of the 2003 customization was dropped during the migration process to give place to some of the new out-of-the-box features offered, however, it is estimated that about 70% of the overall solution is still custom. When I say customization, I mean custom web parts, custom event handlers, custom timer jobs, custom workflows, and custom master pages & style. The migration to 2007 was very painful for the users because they needed to adapt to many new features and components.

Having wrote the business case for our SharePoint 2010 upgrade project, here is the objectives/goal of the project:

Improve the [SharePoint] system by upgrading its technological platform while limiting the impact on the user community.

My next post will describe the steps undertaken by the team to upgrade the current system using the Database Attach Approach.

The Good, the Bad, and the Loopback Check

My development team has been faced with a recuring problem every now and then, and every time we go and spend precious time trying to troubleshoot it. This morning, I finally decided to go ahead and put a post on my blog about it, so that hopefully I will eventually remember to always perform these steps when troubleshooting an error.

Here's the problem, when changing the default SharePoint's Application Pool to run under a domain user, users can no longer access their environment by typing in the computer's name, SharePoint just keeps prompting them to enter a username password. However accessing it using localhost works like a charm.

Ex:

http://localhost/Default.aspx --> Works
http://spnik/Default.aspx --> Keeps prompting for credentials

This problem is cause by a nasty thing in SharePoint called the Loopback Check. The feature was introduced in Windows Server 2003 SP1 as a security mechanism, to prevent connection to a web application using the Fully Qualified Domain Name (FQDN). This so called feature is also included in Windows Server 2008.

If your SharePoint environment is an internet facing one, I wouldn't recommend simply shutting down this feature. However, if your are using it as an intranet, or like in our case, as a development platform, then you probably want this feature turned off. In order for you to achieve this, you'll have to tweak the registry a bit:

1 - Run regedit
2 - Go to Key HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Lsa

3 - In this registry key, create a new dword entry named "DisableLoopbackCheck"
4 - Double click the newly created entry, and set its value to 1
5 - Restart your computer and voilà!

Hopefully this will save you and your time some valuable hours debugging your environment.

SharePoint Summit Quebec 2011

It seems like it's now official, I'll be making an appearance at the SharePoint Summit 2011 in sunny Quebec City, held on April 11th & 12th 2011. My session on Visio Services and Process Visualization got approved. The session will be done in French, but for you English fellows, I'll probably translate the official deck and post it on my blog once I have a final version.

That said, you french followers are going to have a blast. I have the most interesting topic of all the session. However, they gave me the very last time slot of the whole conference, but not to worry, I'll make sure my session is dynamic enough so that I wake all of you up before you go back on the road. We'll have a blast, so make sure you register on the conference web site.

http://www.sharepointsummit2011.com/Quebec/index.htm

SharePoint Technical Community

It's been a long time since I last wrote on this blog. I'd like to apologize to all my fans...which so far, seems to be limited to myself and my own twitter account. None the less, I'm bloggin today to let everybody know that I finally went ahead and initiated the SharePoint Technical Community for the Government of Canada I've been talking about for months now. The first meeting is scheduled for January 13th 2011, and will be held at the Transportation Safety Board of Canada's Head Office down in Gatineau. The invite has been sent out to some individuals I've come to know in the past years, but everybody is invited. If you'd like to join, please drop me an email.

The first session will give an overview of how the current TSB SharePoint development environment is configured, and what development tools our guys are using. I am planning on having monthly meetings with the community.

So, enough with the self promotion, a couple of things got my attention on the SharePoint scene this week, and thought I'd mention it on my blog. First off the SharePoint team finally made the move and transferred their blog onto SharePoint 2010. As @ToddKlindt once said, Shoemakers' child often have the worst shoes.

The second thing that is worth mentionning, is that Microsoft released a new version of their now World Famous "SPDisposeCheck" tool. If, like me, you are a developer and are alway eager to improve your products, SPDisposeCheck is a great utility that will allow you to easily pinpoint SharePoint objects that are loaded into memory, but that are never being dispose properly. This tool should be part of any SharePoint dev's toolbelt.

Why I love SharePoint

I have to admit it, I love SharePoint. I'm a real fan. Microsoft finally got it right. While taking part in the Heads of IT annual retreat last week, I was asked the question "SharePoint, what is is anyway?". Though question you'll say, and I would have to concur. I don't have any problems selling the benefits of SharePoint to anybody. If a vaccum seller was to knock on my door, he'd probably leave without having made a single sell, but having bought a copy of Microsoft SharePoint. I'm that passionate about the product. However, trying to get a straight definition to somebody about what the product really is, isn't an easy task. We've heard it all, SharePoint is the biggest swiss army knife. It is growing with every new release, and includes more and more fields of expertise.

My answer to the question, was the typical answer of any developer who previously had some exposure to ASP.NET development. SharePoint allows you, when building an online collaboration application from the ground-up, to save about 80% of all of your development time. You don't have to deal with coding your authentication, security, your document management functionnality, and even, in some occasions, your data model (by using lists instead). Most of the IT folks think SharePoint is expensive, and that you are paying for stuff you'll never use. While this may be applicable for the full blown entreprise edition, the Windows SharePoint Services (called Foundation in 2010) comes free with any Windows Server license. I say, an entreprise needs to have a pretty strong business case to prove that they need the Entreprise features before making the investment.

You got to learn to love the product, it will revolutionnize how we do business.

Excel Services et les listes SharePoint

J'ai été grandement déçu cette semaine par les capacités incluses dans la composante "Excel Services" qui vient avec la version entreprise de Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007. J'ai découvert avec regret, qu'il est impossible d'afficher un fichier excel utilisant un connecteur à une liste SharePoint avec l'aide des web parts "Excel Web Access". C'est donc dire que Microsoft n'utilise pas ses propres technologies pour supporter l'infrastructure de cette composante excel.

Si vous désirez faire du Business Intelligence avec MOSS 2007, il vous faudra charger les données d'une autre source que de SharePoint duirectement pour vous permettre de les exposées aux utilisateurs. Avec SharePoint 2010, c'est le même scénario lorsqu'il vient le temps d'utiliser la "Excel Web Access" web part. Cependant, la version 2010 de SharePoint introduit une nouvelle web part nommée Chart Part qui permet de créer dynamiquement des graphiques en utilisant les données d'une liste comme source. Certaines solutions tampons existe pour vous permettre d'amener les données des listes dans une feuille de travail excel de façon statique, mais celles-ci rendent les solution quasi inflexible et requierts toutes beaucoup de manipulations manuelles.