Costas Tsaklas’ Blog

The Microsoft SharePoint Products and Technologies Team released SP1 for Windows SharePoint Services 3.0. The service pack fixes a number of issues that existed in the initial release.

For Windows Small Business Server 2003 (and any other supported platform of course) that doesn’t have WSS 3.0 installed, there is a Slipstream release that includes SP 1.

Download and install the full WSS 3.0 with SP1 release at the following link:

Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 with Service Pack 1

If you already have WSS 3.0 installed the service pack can be found here

The first step is to make a backup of the current site. Go to the command prompt and then navigate to the following directory:

c:\program files\common files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\60\Bin

In that directory run the following command:

stsadm.exe -o backup -url http://companyweb -filename c:\backup.dat -overwrite

After the operation completes successfully, copy the backup.dat file to the c:\ drive of the Windows Server 2003 you want to restore it.

On the Windows Server 2003, go to the Control Panel | Add/Remove Windows Components and install ‘Windows SharePoint Services‘. Select the ‘Typical Installation‘. After the installation completes, go to Administrative Tools | Internet Information Services (IIS) Manager and create a new web site. For this post, I will name it ‘intranet’ and I will use the same IP add the IP of the server (port 80)

The next step is to create an A record in the SBS DNS Server to point to the IP address of the site.

Now we are ready to extend the new IIS site. Go to Administrative Tools | SharePoint Central Administration and under ‘Virtual Server Configuration’ click on ‘Configure virtual server settings‘. From the ‘Virtual Server List‘ click on the name of the new IIS site. Click on ‘Extend and create a content database‘

Create a new application pool and name it ‘newcompanyweb‘ (it can be any name) and for the purposes of this post I will use the ‘Network Service‘ as the security account.

It is recommended to have a user-defined account that will run the application pool, so take that into consideration during your planning. Next we supply the email address of the site owner and under security configuration I use NTLM.

A new page will show us that the Virtual Server was Successfully Extended. Click on the ‘OK’ button and exit the browser.

Go to Microsoft’s web site, download and install Windows SharePoint Service Pack 3

Open a new Command Prompt window and navigate again to:

c:\program files\common files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\60\Bin

It’s time to restore the backup to its new location. Run the following command:

stsadm.exe -o restore -url http://intranet -filename c:\backup.dat -overwrite

Open the browser and type: http://intranet

At this point you should be able to see the ‘companyweb’ site from SBS on it’s new home on Windows Server 2003, under a new name

TechNet published a HOW-TO document on migrating SBS 2003 to new hardware. So far there were two options: Either imaging the server and restoring it on different hardware ( personally I like Storagecraft ) or use a more popular technique from SBS-MVP, Jeff Middleton

The new document can be found here

The Internet is full of gems but it takes a bit of time to discover them. One of these gems is a VBScript I recently found that automates backing up MOSS 2007 and WSS 3.0 servers.

MOSS 2007 and WSS 3.0 backup script

Up to now I had a batch file that was doing a similar thing, but this script is way better and I couldn’t pass it by. I tested the script on both an SBS 2003 server and a Win2K3 server which was part of an SBS 2003 domain. The script worked flawlessly with the exception of the email part which need a bit of tweaking to make it work with the SBS Exchange server.

I’m not a MAC user but I’m sure there are shops out there that are using it extensively.

Eriq Neale posted a how-to document on connecting a Macintosh to an SBS 2003 server that I think will come handy when clients want to deploy Macs within their SBS infrastructure.

I recently installed BES Express on two SBS 2003 R2 servers and I found myself looking through different documents in order to make sure that I followed the instructions properly. For that reason I decided to post the steps I followed just in case I need to refer to them again in the future.

First I requested the software from RIM at http://na.blackberry.com/eng/services/server/offers/professional_express.jsp

An email arrived with instructions on how to download and install the software. A couple of hours later I received another email with the keys I would be needing during installation which also provide me for one, free, user license. After that I spend sometime reading the different knowledge base articles about the installation process, among them one that described how to install the BES server on SBS 2003

The first task according to that document was to create a new domain user and give the account the permissions described in another document that can be found here.

Second task was to download and install a new, named instance of MSDE. I went to Microsoft’s web site and I downloaded the engine ( here ). From the different files listed for download at that location the one I needed was the SQL2000.MSDE-KB884525-SP4-x86.EXE. I run the executable and the the files were extracted on the hard drive.

After that I followed the instructions found on another RIM document to install the ‘BlackBerry‘ named MSDE instance.

The time had come to install BES Express. Before that I had to configure ISA to allow traffic on ports 3101 and 3500. I started by creating a user defined protocol with primary connections Outbound at ports 3101 and 3500 and secondary, inbound connections on the same ports. I finished by creating an Access Rule that used the protocol I had just created From the localhost computer to External.

I logged on the server using the user account that had created earlier, made sure that the ‘BlackBerry‘ MSDE instance was running (Services console) and run the BES executable. The process was pretty much straight forward and very easy following the interactive, step-by-step guide, that RIM provided. When it finished (requires one reboot half way through the process), I logged in SBS using again the BES user account and added the User Account to the BES Server

As a precaution I followed the instructions that I found here to add dependencies between the BlackBerry MSDE instance and some of the BES Services.

After the installation completed I saw the ‘Java Update’ icon on the task bar. I read that BES requires the Java version that it installs, and for that reason I canceled the update. A thing that I observed is that one of the servers spent more time applying “Computer Settings” during reboot than usual. I’m not sure if that is related to BES or not but I plan to follow up if I come to some concrete conclusion.

Get it here

I download it, run it and found a couple of issues that needed to be fixed. Very handy tool indeed.

I just finished a new SBS 2003 R2 roll-out with the majority of the computers running Windows Vista Business and Ultimate.

The rollout finished pretty much without any major problems. After all the computers joined the domain I decided to take a VB script I use to map network drives and I adjusted it to meet the client’s needs. I added the script to the Default Domain Policy GPO. Unfortunately the drives weren’t mapped to the Vista clients.

After spending some time researching the issue, I came across the solution in the form of a Microsoft Knowledge Base article http://support.microsoft.com/kb/937624

The problem was related to the Vista UAC and the article describes the modifications to the registry that need to be done in order to solve it.

If the Remote Web Workplace (RWW) is missing links (either from the Administrator or User interface), it is possible that registry entries have been corrupted. The following solution was suggested by Terence Liu from Microsoft:

Verify the correct flag is set it the registry to either hide or display
the links as desired.

Note: The key “STS” is the switch of the companyweb site link on RWW.
Verify the “STS” key is set to “0×00000001″

a. For the Administrator RWW, these are the default settings.
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\SmallBusinessServer\
RemoteUserPortal\AdminLinks]

“ServerTS”=dword:00000001
“ClientTS”=dword:00000001
“Help”=dword:00000001
“Community”=dword:00000001
“RA”=dword:00000001
“HelpDesk”=dword:00000001
“STS”=dword:00000001
“PerfReport”=dword:00000000
“UsageReport”=dword:00000000
“OWA”=dword:00000001
“CM”=dword:00000001
“RPC”=dword:00000001

b. For user RWW, these are the default settings
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\SmallBusinessServer\
RemoteUserPortal\KWLinks]

“AppTS”=dword:00000001
“TS”=dword:00000001
“Help”=dword:00000001
“OWA”=dword:00000001
“STS”=dword:00000001
“CM”=dword:00000001
“UsageReport”=dword:00000000
“RPC”=dword:00000001

Note:
1. Some flags will vary depending on specific wizards that have been, or
not yet run. (example – perfreports)
2. 1 = display, 0 = hide

If we cannot resolve the issue after we perform the above steps, we may
need to complete reinstall the RWW component.