When Software Attacks!

Incoming Email with SharePoint on Windows Server 2008

I’ve been meaning to write this up for a while, simply because it’s not quite as straightforward as with Server 2005.

To configure incoming email on SharePoint when running on Server 2008 you’ll need to run through the following steps:

  1. Install the SMTP feature
    Open Server Manager. Click on Features in the left hand column then click add features in the right hand pane. Tick the SMTP Server check box and click install.
  2. Configure the SMTP Service in IIS Manager (version 7)
    Start Internet Information Services (IIS) Manager from Administration tools in the Start Menu. Once open, click the name of the web server to bring up the options in the centre panel. In the centre panel, right-click SMTP E-mail and select Open Feature from the menu.
    Click the option to ‘store e-mail in pickup directory’ and set the path to be c:\inetpub\mailroot\Drop (that’s the default).
  3. Configure the SMTP Service in ISS Manager (version 7)
    Start Internet Information Services (IIS) 6.0 Manager from Administration tools in the Start Menu. Expand the server to show the SMTP service. In the ‘domains’ section, add any email domain aliases you need in there. Configure the other SMTP service settings just like you did with Server 2005.

SharePoint Service Pack 2 Pains

I finally bit the bullet and decided to upgrade our SharePoint farm yesterday. I’d been holding off for a while because of time constraints and because of a known issue with Project Server, also part of our farm.

I took careful steps to increment the farm from the SP1+Infrastructure update all the way through each CU up until the service pack. That all worked fine. It was when I tried SP2 I hit problems.


Creating a new Virtual PC using the Virtual Windows XP Base Disk

One of the most useful elements of the Virtual Windows XP feature in Windows 7 is that the VPC is easily replicated and you can have multiple virtual machines all publishing applications which run in their own sandboxes.

  1. Create a new Virtual Machine

  2. Create a Differencing Hard Disk from the Virtual Windows XP Base

  3. Start the VM and run through the setup wizard:

  4. Accept the Licence Agreement

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  5. Set the keyboard and locale to your needs

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NewSID fails on Windows Server 2008 R2

The title says it all. I’m currently building a virtual lab to test DirectAccess and every time I run newsid on windows server 2008 R2 the system bluescreens irrevocably on reboot. I’ve now switched to using sysprep to change the SID. Here’s hoping the sysinternals guys update what is undoubtedly one of the most useful tools around!


Install System Center Capacity Planner 2007 on Windows 7

I’ve been using Windows 7 for a while now, but I’ve never needed to install the System Center Capacity Planner (Andy usually handles that side of our SharePoint engagements). He now has taken the plunge with Microsoft’s shiny OS and hit a problem: SCCP refused to install with an error message saying it was only supported on Windows XP (!)

We tried all sorts, and in the end I resorted to our old friend, Orca – the MSI editor shipped with the Windows SDK. Looking through the tables I found an entry in LaunchCondition specifying ‘VersionNT >=500 AND VersionNT <=600’