I’ve never been a big fan of SharePoint, but it had become obvious that installing WSS 3.0 would allow me to get a very functional document library and knowledge base online for internal users in a very short time frame. I recently heard that the second rule of the Army is, “If it’s stupid but it works, it isn’t stupid.” It rung very true.

So now I have it and I needed to redesign it. There were two main suggestions I found online about redesigning SharePoint:

1. Surrender to SharePoint Designer
2. Do not edit “core.css”

First, SharePoint Designer is a descendant of FrontPage. That’s enough to convince a seasoned web developer not to use it. Second, I was careful and backed up files before changing them. I could easily revert back. Third, all changes were made in a development environment and thoroughly tested before being released to the wild.

User-testing helped me to design the version of a SharePoint installation that we both want and need in Photoshop, but changes to a Cascading Style Sheet weren’t going to do it.

To get the results I needed, I edited several of the master pages and user control pages, the “core.css”, two images as well as adding a theme-specific style sheet and images.

Lessons Learned and Best Practices

• Set up a test environment and restore a recent copy of the SharePoint back up. Test your design changes here. Obvious and worth it.
• Create your own theme, but choose the one that looks the most similar to copy. There are plenty of places that will tell you how to create your own theme by copying an existing one, renaming it and then making your edits so I’ll skip that. By choosing one with a similar color scheme to your goal, you can save yourself a lot of time searching through tons of code.
• Don’t be afraid to make changes, just make sure that you have a back up. Some of the design changes I made forced me to edit the master and user control files. What really surprised me was that some design changes could ONLY be made by editing the “core.css”.
• Import a Style Sheet. Use it as much as possible. (It’s worth noting that many sources online recommend this. They also say not to edit the master pages, but then say you have to add the code to import this new CSS file to the default.master. Confusing.)
• Use GIFs over PNGs for images. PNGs looked great in everything but Internet Explorer. Only GIFs survived cross-browser testing.

Where Are All The Files You Will Need?

• Images: Local Drive\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\12\TEMPLATE\IMAGES
• Cascading Style Sheets: Local Drive\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\12\TEMPLATE\LAYOUTS\1033\STYLES
• Default.Master: Local Drive\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\12\TEMPLATE\GLOBAL
• Other Helpful Code Files (Notably Application.Master): Local Drive\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\12\TEMPLATE\LAYOUTS
• The Themes: Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\12\TEMPLATE\THEMES
• SPTHEMES.XML (Defines the themes available): Local Drive\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\12\TEMPLATE\LAYOUTS\1033

Related Articles

• SharePoint Research
• Migrating SharePoint
• Getting Site Search to Work

I recently upgraded a website to ASP.Net. The old site was not only popular (20-25K hits a month), it had been in existence for eight years, so it was no surprise that there were plenty of old links directed to the old home page, “default.php”.

After submitting the site changes to the search engines, I needed to account for folks who had specified the old home page file with their link to our site. I first added in URL mappings, but I have had less than stellar results with them. It wasn’t the “one hundred percent solution” I wanted.

My research pointed me to 301 redirects. Despite the fact that my sites are coded in C sharp, .Net is nice enough to let me use VB code I found as well. Since all that was really involved was creating a dummy page that would attract the old requests and redirect them appropriately, the two sets of code never see each other anyway.

There are three steps:

1. Create a blank text document named the same as the page in question.
2. Add the code below.
3. Post the file to your website directory

Create a blank text document and name it the same as your offending page, in my case “default.php”.  Then include the code below, replacing my dummy location with the new one.

<%@ Language=”VBScript” %>
<%
Response.Status=”301 Moved Permanently”
Response.AddHeader”Location”,”http://URLGoesHere/”
%>

Add the new dummy file to your site’s directory and you’re all set. A further step would be to notify those sites that send you a lot of traffic about the update, but this allows you to handle your side quite efficiently.

We are running Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 as both an intranet and a document library for a reasonably small (less than 1000 seats) user base. We use a two-server set up with one for the front-end and another for the databases.

For various reasons, we transferred the web front-end to a new server. The transfer was successful, but the search functionality no longer worked.

The Error

Access is denied. Check that the Default Content Access Account has access to this content, or add a crawl rule to crawl this content.   (0×80041205)

The Fix

Many thanks to Sven Gillis’ post here: http://svengillis.blogspot.com/2008/10/access-denied-when-crawling-moss.html

The solution was to disable the loopback check on the servers hosting SharePoint. Adding the hostnames served to the BackConnectionHostNames list in the registry on the SharePoint servers wasn’t enough, the loopback check had to be completely disabled.

Disable the loopback check

Follow these steps:

1. Click Start, click Run, type regedit, and then click OK.
2. In Registry Editor, locate and then click the following registry key: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Lsa
3. Right-click Lsa, point to New, and then click DWORD Value.
4. Type DisableLoopbackCheck, and then press ENTER.
5. Right-click DisableLoopbackCheck, and then click Modify.
6. n the Value data box, type 1, and then click OK.
7. Quit Registry Editor, and then restart your computer.

I needed to migrate a Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 (WSS 3.0) front-end application from one server to another.

Issues

• Attempts to install another just another front-end failed, giving us a “Failed to connect to the configuration database” error.
• The Central Administration (CA) site will need to be moved as well.
• Need to minimize any down time to users.

The Solution

To first install an entirely new version of WSS 3.0 on the new server. Then we restore current data from the latest back up on the currently running WS 3.0 instance.

Section 0.1 – Before you get started

1. Set up test URLs for both your WSS 3.0 site as well as the admin site
   • For example, http://SharePointTest and http://SharePointAdminTest
   • Verify the user name and password for the account used to set up your current instance of WSS 3.0.

Section 1.0 – Install a clean version of WSS 3.0

The goal of this phase is to set up a brand new version of WSS 3.0 to which we can restore data. Make sure to use the same user credentials to create this new site as were used to create the existing WSS 3.0 instance.

1. Install SharePoint as a new instance of a Web-Front end
   • Choose the “Advanced” installation
   • Choose “Web Front End”.
   • Under “Data Location”, you choose where to save your data.
2. In the “SharePoint Configuration Wizard”,
   • Choose “No, I want to create a new server farm”
   • Put your new DBs on the same server as the live ones
     • DB names do not have to be the same as the live versions to restore.
     • We chose to use a naming convention that would group our DBs together.
   • Use the same log in credentials used to create the current live application.
   • You can specify a port number, but it doesn’t seem to matter whether you do or you use their default. Best practices seem to be to have a URL like http://SharePointAdmin already set up to use for your administration site.

Section 1.1.1 – Configure the new WS 3.0 instance – Set up site search

To get the site ready for the restoration, you have to set up the search services and create the web application.

1. Run the CA web site. This will either have popped up after the configuration wizard or can be found under “Start/All Programs”.
2. Select the “Operations” tab across the top of the site
3. Select “Services on Server”
4. “Windows SharePoint Services Search” should need to be started. Click the title rather than “Start” to configure it.
5. For both the “Service Account” and the “Content Access Account User”, use the same administrator account you used to install the application.
6. Leave everything else as its default.
7. After the “Operation in progress” screen, you will still likely have to start the search service.

Section 1.1.2 – Configure the new WS 3.0 instance – Create the web application

1. Select the Application Management tab.
2. Select Create or Extend a Web Application.
3. Click on Create a new Web Application.
4. For “Create a new IIS web site”, give your new site a unique name. Preferably the test URL you created in Section 0.1.
5. In the Select a security account for this application pool, again use your administrator account information.
6. Specify your “Database Server”.
7. Specify your “Database Name”.
8. Under “Select Windows SharePoint Search Services Server”, there should only be one option for you to select. If there is more than one, choose the target server you wish to use as your site host.
9. Restart IIS. (The command-line code is: iisreset /noforce)

Section 2.0 – Restoring SharePoint

Create a directory on your target machine and copy the latest version of your SharePoint back up to it. In the same directory, create a .bat file with the following code:

c:
cd\program files\common files\microsoft shared\web server extensions\12\bin
pause 111

stsadm -o restore -url http://YourTestURL -filename PathToTheBackUpHere -overwrite
pause 333

1. Doubt-click your newly-created .bat file.
2. The process should take some time, depending on how much data you are restoring.
3. After receiving the “Operation completed Successfully” message, open your new WSS 3.0 site to verify that the data is now there.

Section 3.0 – Clean Up

• Redirect traffic from the old WSS 3.0 instance to the new one.
• Turn off and uninstall the old instance of WSS 3.0.
• Monitor for any problems.

We have decided to roll out a customized version of Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 as our intranet and document library. Much of my time recently has been concentrated on research, which leads me to a book recommendation: Microsoft SharePoint 2007 Unleashed by Michael Noel and Colin Spence. It does a great job of detailing what SharePoint can do and offers some sound recommendations of how to do it.

The one big surprise: there is no real mention of the difference between Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (the full, paid version) and WSS 3.0 (the free, limited version). For that, I had to turn to the web, where I found the following two comparisons that I found very helpful:

• http://www.sharepointprovider.com/moss-hosting/compare-wss-moss.asp
• http://articles.techrepublic.com.com/5100-10878_11-6150512.html?tag=rbxccnbtr1

Our initial needs analysis showed us that we will only need WSS 3.0, but the links above were terribly helpful in getting us to that decision.