Costas Tsaklas’ Blog

SBS 2008 includes the latest version of Windows SharePoint Services, WSS 3.0 and companyweb is built on this version.

In order to properly configure the environment we have to go through a list of Administrative Tasks that are listed in the SharePoint 3.0 Central Administration module (which is accessed from the Administrative Tools menu).

This post is focusing on changing the Central Administration pool account and could seem simplistic for many, but I thing is very important for those with not much experience in SharePoint to understand what the necessary steps are to configure it properly.

Let’s start by creating a new user account for the Application Pool.  This should be a Standard User account

After the account is created, we can go to its Properties and we’ll see that the account is a member of the default SBS groups.

We can safely remove all the groups listed there and click OK

Now that we created the account, let’s go back Central Administration.  Towards the bottom of the screen we see the ‘Central Administration application pool account should be unique’ task.

Let’s see what is the current account that is used by the Central Admin Pool.  If we go to Internet Information Services (IIS) Manager (from the Administrative Tools menu) and click on the Application Pools option, we’ll see on the right pane the SharePoint Central Administration pool using the NetworkService account.  This is the account we want to change.

This application pool is used by the SharePoint Central Administration site and we can verify that, by clicking on Sites, then select SharePoint Central Administration and click on Basic Settings… on the right pane.

From the window that opens up we can see that under Application Pool, the SharePoint Central Administration pool is listed

Now that we know what we need to change, let’s go back to the Administration Console and select the task we want to work on.

Here is the tricky part.  When we select the Change Service Accounts option,

we come to a page that let’s us select the Web Application pool , but the Central Administration Application Pool is not listed.  The only application pools listed there are the SBS SharePoint AppPool and the SharePoint – 80 pool.

In order to change the Central Administration Application Pool account we have to go to the Command Prompt(with Administrative credentials) and issue the following statement from the 12 hive (which is under C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\12\bin) :

stsadm -o updatefarmcredentials -userlogin <DOMAIN>\useraccount -password <password>

After that we must issue the iisreset /noforce command.

If we now go back to IIS Manager, and examine the account for the Central Admin. Pool, we’ll see that it was changed to our custom account…

 Running the stsadm command, added the user account to the appropriate security groups as well.

That’s all it takes to change the Central Administration Application Pool account.  The question now is what does the Service Accounts page change?  The next post will explain and show how to change the SBS SharePoint AppPool account.

One thing to keep in mind…. In SharePoint, everything must change from within the environment.

Another very interesting post which includes three articles on how to implement Forms based authentication on MOSS2007 and WSS 3.0.

Here is the link: Forms Based Authentication

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

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.

A very useful white paper on backup and recovery of SharePoint installations was posted at TechNet. The document was brought to my attention by a post at the Microsoft SharePoint Products and Technologies Team Blog

There was definitely a need for a step-by-step guide on backing up SharePoint installation. Although the document refers to MOSS 2007, the concepts are applicable to WSS 3.0 as well.

Here are some more online video clips on SharePoint

http://sharepoint-screencasts.com/

http://events.unisfair.com/index.jsp?eid=164&seid=585

I attended this training and I have to admit it had more content than I could handle. Thankfully the sessions have been recorded and will be available for later viewing at that above link.

I’ll definitely have to spend sometime again on the session about “Features”. Awesome stuff!!

I have been running Office 2007 on Windows Vista Ultimate and every time I tried to open a document stored in WSS 3.0 I would be prompted to provide my credentials. I had asked about that issue and I was told that this is a security feature.

Well… it seems it was a bug. The Microsoft SharePoint Products and Technologies Team posted a workaround to their blog. The following steps solve the problem

1. Go to IE7 -> Internet Options -> Connections -> LAN Settings
2. Enable ‘Automatically detect settings’ – this option will prevent the prompt if it effectively enables a proxy server and enables bypassing the proxy for local addresses.
3. Setup a ‘fake proxy’ by doing the following:

• Click the Proxy Server checkbox. Set the address to “fake proxy” without the quotes and the port to 80.
• Click the “Bypass proxy server for local addresses” checkbox.
• Click Advanced and put an * in the Exceptions list to cause all addresses (including external ones) to be bypassed.

Here is the link to the post

I was looking for a free weather web part for some time and finally I found one. Not that I need it badly but it looks pretty cool on the front page of the intranet. Click here to download it.