Thursday, June 25, 2009

Hotfix for the SP2 issue is available now

Service Pack 2 Update.

The public update for the Service Pack 2 expiration date issue<http://blogs.msdn.com/sharepoint/archive/2009/05/21/attention-important-information-on-service-pack-2.aspx> is now available for download.

Whoo-hoo, I hope that you caught this one!

The update can be applied before or after Service Pack 2 installation. If the update is applied prior to installing Service Pack 2 it will prevent the expiration date from being improperly activated during installation of Service Pack 2, if it is applied after Service Pack 2, it removes the expiration date incorrectly set during installation of Service Pack 2.

Installation instructions and download links for x86 and x64 are available in this KB: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/971620

For 32 is this link: http://download.microsoft.com/download/2/F/5/2F51AB71-1325-49D2-9CB9-18DEC4780E99/office2007-kb971620-fullfile-x86-glb.exe

For 64, this one: http://download.microsoft.com/download/5/B/B/5BBD34A9-C528-42B0-8A5F-9A8997B25C32/office2007-kb971620-fullfile-x64-glb.exe

Profile properties import through BDC connection to Oracle SAP

Interesting fact was uncovered during our enterprise deployment project, and I wanted to share it.

The client has Oracle SAP that they are using across the globe, and we were supplementing user profile properties that have very limited information in AD through BDC to Oracle. Import through BDC was very slow, I mean VERY slow.

If AD full import was taking 1 1/2 hour to import 70,000 user profiles, then BDC part would take around 20+ hours. with this numbers, there was no way for us to meet SLAs.

After Oracle team, Microsoft team, and us started investigating the issue, some interesting things were uncovered.

Apparently in our ADF we were using simple select statement, to oracle side our “identifier” or record ID (ex:“win_no”) field was being passed from SharePoint as a numeric field. In the world I know, this is how you treat record ID.

But on the Oracle side this field was defined as a character. In this scenario, Oracle disabled the use of the index because the field types do not match. With the index disabled the process of retrieving records was slow.

The issue was solved by the “to_char” we put in select statement to make sure that BDC “does not lose anything in the translation”. Final testing showed that BDC import was brought down from 20+ hours to under 2.

When I was at NY User Group meeting in June, I have heard someone saying that their BDC import was taking about 8 hours to finish, and for a while, I thought that it was normal. Well… It is, if your field types do not match! :-)

Enjoy

Converting Hyper-v VHD to VMware

Real bummer. I had to power off my server that was running Hyper-v and the whole bunch of VMs. Until I get the hyper-v host back, I decided to continue my development on one of the machines by converting it into vmware. The general VMware converter that allows you to convert from VHD is not working with POWERED OFF hyper-v VHD. apparently you can convert it only as a physical machine by giving the IP address, which in my case is not possible as I do not have another Hyper-v host. I guess I have to be patient and wait for the server to get back

:-(

Publishing Search Results in MOSS

Never noticed it before, but after checking it on several installations of MOSS, it appears that the search is “ignoring” “start Date” on publishing pages and includes all documents that had not been published yet.

If you create for example an article and set publish date one week from now, you have to modify your search not to include these articles into search results until this date had been reached.

Tuesday, June 2, 2009

New York SharePoint User Group meeting June 3, 2009

It is a short notice, but I urge you to attend this meeting.

Jim Kane will present on "Challenges and SharePoint Enterprise Deployments (& a few solutions)"

This presentation will focus on the many and varied challenges of implementing SharePoint on an enterprise level, whether for a small company or for a large company. Enterprise deployments present unique issues; from expectations through politics, from infrastructure decisions through going out-of-the-box or customizing. Deploying SharePoint across an enterprise can get messy quickly once more than a few people are involved in decision making.
We'll look at some real-life examples of challenges, and some ways to meet those challenges. Be prepared to participate in the discussion!

I’ve known Jim for quite a while and the first time I met him it happened at one of the New York User Group meetings. Jim and I are currently working on the same project (enterprise deployment), but from different side. Sides do not really matter form the project point of view, but I’m curious to find out how the challenges that we all are facing are being viewed from a different perspective.

I’ll see you there :-)