After almost 10 years since my last certification efforts, I took some SharePoint 2010 exams in june and passed! Although being an IT Pro, the next two exams on my list are the SharePoint 2010 development exams. Because you can never know too much about the “other side”. I’ll keep you posted on my progress on these ones.

The first edition of the SharePoint Best Practices Conference in London was a winner. Great gig, great speakers, great content & great city to stay in. I was hoping that @stevesmithck and his team would be organizing another one next year, and they do! The SharePoint 2010 Evolution Conference is due April 19 - 21 in London.

A quick look at the already confirmed speakers shows me that they did an even better job than last year. The agenda looks very promising too. I can’t wait to go - maybe I’ll even order some Twitter T-shirts this time as the social networking aspect of conferences continues to grow. Most important, I’ll be sure not to miss SharePint this time - booking my flight accordingly :-)

I was called by a customer who could not get his InfoPath forms to render anymore after the upgrade to SharePoint 2007 SP2. Forms server spitted out the following error message while rendering any form::

Cannot complete this action. Please try again.   at Microsoft.SharePoint.Library.SPRequestInternalClass.ListRegionalOptions(UInt32 dwCategory, UInt32 dwOption, String bstrUrl)
   at Microsoft.SharePoint.Library.SPRequest.ListRegionalOptions(UInt32 dwCategory, UInt32 dwOption, String bstrUrl)

After a few minutes it came to me that this customer had two additional language packs installed: Dutch & French (hey, we’re in Belgium). Apparently the service packs for this language packs were not installed. I verified this by running a short script I had lying around to see what Office versions are installed on a machine.

Set oWI = CreateObject("WindowsInstaller.Installer")
For Each prod In oWI.Products
If UCase(Right(prod, 7)) = "0FF1CE}" Then sOutput = sOutput & prod & vbTab & oWI.ProductInfo(prod, "VersionString") & vbTab  & oWI.ProductInfo(prod, "ProductName") & vbCrLf
Next
wscript.echo sOutput

The output clearly stated that the language packs were still on an older version. So I installed the language pack service packs, ran the configuration wizard on each machine and gone were the errors!

One word of caution for people trying to download these service packs. Each language has its own installer, so make sure you select the right one! This often misleads people.

If, for example, you try to install the language service pack for the original language that came with your WSS or MOSS installation, you are greeted with an error message because the main SP2 upgrade already upgraded your base installation language.

Also, be aware of the fact you have to download a service pack for each language and for each SharePoint component! The correct order in which to install everything was:

• WSS 3.0 Service Pack 2
• WSS 3.0 Dutch Language Pack Service Pack 2
• WSS 3.0 French Language Pack Service Pack 2
• MOSS 2007 Service Pack 2
• MOSS 2007 Dutch Language Pack Service Pack 2
• MOSS 2007 French Language Pack Service Pack 2

You can run the configuration wizard once after all fixes are installed.

I’m kind of exited to announce that the Office System 2007 & Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 Service Pack 2 is now available for download.

A complete list of all available fixes is available at http://support.microsoft.com/kb/968170/

The SharePoint Team Blog outlines some additional details about SharePoint-specifics. As usual, Joel Oleson has all the details concerning SharePoint on his blog too.

Very nice is the addition to stsadm of a new switch called “preupgradecheck”. It checks your installation for readiness for SharePoint 14! I’m gonna try this right away ;-)

A few days ago, SQL Server 2008 SP1 has been released. Except for the pile of hotfixes that it contains, I find this release particularly interesting because of a couple reasons:

• Slipstream – You are now able to integrate the base installation with service packs (or Hotfixes) and install in a single step.
• Service Pack Uninstall – You are now able to uninstall only the Service Pack (without removing the whole instance)
• Report Builder 2.0 Click Once capability

As far as SharePoint is concerned, I’m looking forward to the new version of the Reporting Services Addin that was released together with the service pack. The new Report Builder is also included, so your users can finally edit their reports from within the SharePoint site. I’ll post my findings on this one very soon!

I'm currently at the SharePoint Best Practices Conference in London. Very exiting venue, all focused on SharePoint! Follow my updates on Twitter to see what I'm at, or join in on the buzz using the #spbpuk tag. I'm spending most of my time on the IT Pro track and already saw some amazing sessions by Spencer Harbar, Joel Oleson & Mike Watson.

[Update: Probably the best SharePoint conference to date!] 

I recently found out about SQL Aliases and how to use them in combination with SharePoint installations. It enables you to define local alias name to connect to with a SQL Client, so you can change the actual connection later on. This may come in handy when switching over to your mirror database server, when moving servers, when virtualizing you database server etc.

This is how it’s done:

1) Open the cliconfg.exe tool and go to the Alias tab

2) Click Add to add a new alias. Choose a Network Library and then configure your alias. In my example I use MossDBServer as my alias, and ActualServerName:1433 as the underlying connection.

3) Use the alias name in your client app, e.g. the SharePoint Configuration Wizard:

4) When time has come to change the underlying connection, just launch cliconfg.exe again and make your change:

I can think of at least a couple scenario’s where this might come in handy. Fancy a simpler way to move all of your MOSS databases anyone? Change the port SQL Server is listening to?

Recently I enabled Kerberos authentication for my SharePoint web applications. Since then, we began to receive random blue screens. After analysis of the crash dump, we received the following error message:

BugCheck 7E, {ffffffffc000001d, fffffa6000000000, fffffa60005a5848, fffffa60005a5220}Probably caused by : HTTP.sys ( HTTP!UlAuthenticate+73 )

That immediately ringed a bell, as we implemented Kernel Mode Authentication by manually changing the applicationHost.config file on our webserver. The details on the why and how are detailed in these articles.

Microsoft recently published http://support.microsoft.com/kb/962943, that should solve this issue! At the time of writing, I could only find this KB via the Microsoft Support website – so it must be so recent that Google did not pick it up yet ;-)

Recently I've been struggling with the integration of Reporting Services 2008 and SharePoint 2007. One of the fundamental steps in getting this to work, is to grant the Reporting Services service account (domain user of course) the necessary rights in your SharePoint databases. The provided addin is supposed to do this for you. However, in my farm setup I cannot get it to work properly. Every time I'm greeted with the following error: "Unable to connect to the Report Server WMI provider". It seems that the server hosting the Central Administration website cannot connect properly to the SSRS server.

One way to get around this, is to install the Central Administration website on the SSRS server - at least temporarily. But as you add content databases in the future, you must follow this scenario again.

Therefore I recorded all steps that this function performs:

1) adds the SSRS service account to the WSS_WPG group on the Reporting Server

2) Grants the SSRS service account the following rights on your SharePoint databases:

• Contentdb for central administration: db_owner & WSS_Content_Application_Pools
• Configuration db: WSS_Content_Application_Pools
• For every other content db: db_owner

That's all there is to it!

Wanna know the in's and out's of protecting your SharePoint installation with Microsoft DPM? Be sure to read these two articles on the Windows Server Setup / Core Team  blog!

SharePoint Protection and Recovery using DPM 2007 - Part I

SharePoint Protection and Recovery using DPM 2007 - Part II