When Software Attacks!

Solve ‘pending reboot’ setup show stopper for CRM 4 Client (with Update Rollup 7)

I’ve been extremely busy over the past week creating demo systems and updating our own internal Black Marble systems. Part of that long list of tasks was to get around to testing the CRM 4 Outlook client with Outlook 2010. For those who don’t know, you need the Update Rollup7 client if you want to use Outlook 2010 (and x86 Office only need apply). You can download a slipstreamed client installer from Microsoft.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Monday, January 11, 2010

Twitter clients: Twinbox and Tweetz

Anybody who follows me on twitter will know that @rikhepworth is by no means a prolific tweeter. However, I do follow a number of people around the planet, and in addition to the ubiquitous Tweetie2 on my iPhone, I have found two clients to be useful and reliable. The first is Tweetz, from Blue Onion Software. This is a great gadget for the Windows 7 desktop (or Vista Sidebar). The UI is simple and extremely usable (I love the way I can scroll the history for older tweets) and it makes posting a breeze.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Monday, January 11, 2010

Reassigning the correct SSL certificate to SharePoint 2010 Web Services IIS Site

Prologue This post is about assigning an SSL certificate to an IIS 7.5-hosted website which is not located in the Personal Certificate store. The steps shown are not SharePoint-specific, however. Hopefully this post will save you the large amount of time I spent hunting down the information on how to do this. The usual background I’ve been installing and configuring a SharePoint 2010 system that we can use here at Black Marble for our demo sessions.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Thursday, January 7, 2010

SharePoint Search Gatherer Error 10032

We encountered a problem recently with a two server farm. One server was configured as index and query server. Both servers were delivering pages to users. If a user executed a search on the server which did not run the search services, the Search page returned an error, and we saw the following in the application log and SharePoint logs: Event Type: Error Event Source: Office Server Search Event Category: Gatherer Event ID: 10032 Description: Could not create a database session.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Friday, September 25, 2009

Kerberos for SharePoint on Server 2008 with IIS 7

UPDATE: Spence posted a great comment pointing out some issues with this post. Richard then restored our Community Server DB to a point in time before the post, so it’s been wiped. Post again, Spence, please, as I didn’t get chance to copy the text of the comment, I’m afraid. I’ve not been doing so well with blog posts lately. I have more than one currently in process but unposted, and I just can’t seem to get the time to finish them – so apologies, CSW, for not getting the article I promised up yet, but I am working on it.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Monday, July 6, 2009

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.

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: 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.

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

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. Create a new Virtual Machine Create a Differencing Hard Disk from the Virtual Windows XP Base Start the VM and run through the setup wizard: Accept the Licence Agreement image ] Set the keyboard and locale to your needs

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Tuesday, May 26, 2009

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!

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Friday, May 8, 2009