When Software Attacks!

Configuring IIS Bindings to include host headers with https on Windows Server 2008 (for SharePoint)

NOTE: We use a wildcard SSL certificate which makes our life much easier when dealing with multiple hostnames. I have not tested this approach with multiple SSL certificates for specific sites.

We’ve been reconfiguring our SharePoint 2007 farm over the past couple of days and it’s now hosted on Windows Server 2008 and using NLB (network load balancing). The load balancer has been configured with a single public IP address and all our previous DNS CNAME registrations have been replaced with hostname A registrations pointing at the address. With our previous configuration we had multiple IP addresses on the server, one for each web application. Each IIS web site was then configured with a host header and ip address to allow for secure traffic over HTTPS.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Wednesday, May 27, 2009

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.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Wednesday, May 27, 2009

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.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Wednesday, May 27, 2009

SharePoint 2007: Following Adobe Instructions Can Cause Problems

Having just spent a long time examining the state of a new farm we’ve been working on for demonstrations, I would like to issue a warning…

The Problem: None of the ‘New…’ menu items in our document libraries would work – we were seeing the error message:

‘Edit Document’ requires a Windows SharePoint Services-compatible application and Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.0 or greater.

The Solution: Correcting an error in the docicon.xml file which lives in c:\program files\common files\microsoft shared\web server extensions\12\TEMPLATE\XML

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Friday, February 6, 2009

Workflow and SQL Error: Part 3

As you may remember from my earlier post and subsequent follow-up, we have been seeing an issue related to workflows and the Workflow History list in SharePoint 2007. As I’ve already mentioned, the case is with Microsoft and I also said that I would post updates as new information arrived. Today, more detail has emerged and, as promised, I am sharing.

Whilst replicating the fault today we were having trouble - one of us had a SharePoint install that failed every time and the other had one which would not fail at all. Whilst looking at possible differences we realised that the failing site was a publishing site and the non-failing site was a team site.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Thursday, August 28, 2008

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Rik is CEO and Co-founder of Zure in the UK. He is a recipient of the Microsoft MVP Award and a Microsoft Regional Director. He is a member of the admin team for the Global Azure worldwide community event.

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