Paul Liebrand's Weblog

I ran into an issue attempting to get Project Sever 2007 working with SQL Sever 2008 Analysis Services and thought I would create a post about it in case other people are experiencing the same issue.

The first thing to note is the article on TechNet are written as if everything is installed on the same server; that is not the case in my environment. High level overview of my environment:

• SharePoint Farm
• Distributed SQL Server 2005 (stores SharePoint DBs and Project Server 2007 DBs)
• Distributed SQL Server 2008 Analysis Services (for Project Server 2007 cube)

The second thing to note is that the instructions for using SQL Server 2008 Analysis Services specifically call out installing the following components from the Feature Pack for Microsoft SQL 2005 – December 2008 (in this order):

• SQL Native Client
• Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Management Objects Collection
• Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Backward Compatibility Components

Following these instructions to a tee I received the following error message when attempt to build my cube:

Failed to build the OLAP cubes. Error: Analysis Services session failed with the following error: Failed to connect to the Analysis Services server <<SAS Server>>. Error: Cannot connect to the repository. Analysis server: <<SAS Server>> Error: Provider cannot be found. It may not be properly installed.

According to the troubleshooting guide at the bottom of the article this means I do not have the right version of the client installed. Very baffling – I installed everything straight from the links provided in the article.

Next I decided to create the cube against a SQL Server 2005 Analysis Service to see if I had any different results.

Upon creating the cube, I received the following error message:

Analysis Services session failed with the following error: Failed to connect to the Analysis Services server <<SAS Server>>. Error: Cannot connect to the repository. Analysis server: <<SAS Server>> Error: SQL Network Interfaces: Error getting enabled protocols list from registry [xFFFFFFFF].

I did a little searching with the help of a co-worker and I was able to resolve both these issues.

Solutions

1. Error: Provider cannot be found. It may not be properly installed.

This issue was resolved by installing the SQL 2008 Native Client on the Project Server 2007 server. Yes, the SQL 2005 Native Client, 2005 Management Objects Collection, and 2005 Backwards Compatibility Components are still needed.

2. SQL Network Interfaces: Error getting enabled protocols list from registry [xFFFFFFFF]

This issue was resolved by making the following registry change on the Project Server 2007 server.

Locate the following registry key:

HKLM\Software\Microsoft\MSSQLServer\Client\SNI9.0

And for the ProtocolOrder entry should be set to:

tcp
np
sm

Reference: http://serverfault.com/questions/53915/sql-server-2005-error-getting-enabled-protocols-list-from-registry-xffffffff

I hope this helps anyone else that struggled with this.

I would like to assume many people have heard of the SharePoint related site called SharePointMagazine.net, brought to us by Arno Nel (@arnonel). The SharePointMagazine.net site has a tremendous amount of great content from many guest authors and you should check it out of you have not already.

So why this blog post? Well Arno has done it again! Today he announced SPoint.me, The SharePoint Social Network. This social networking site takes a little bit of each of the social network sites we use today (Twitter, Facebook, Linked In, etc.) and combine them together into one with the focus being everything SharePoint.

Some of the features SPoint.me offer include:

• Blog hosting
• Groups
• Forums
• Twitter integration (Facebook soon!)

The only real downer I have found so far is the inability to connect my existing blog to my profile page. I am sure its in there and I am just overlooking but that is a minor detail. (UPDATE: This has been resolved – there is now a Social section under your profile where you can fill this information out)

I posted a comment today on SPoint.me about wanting an iPhone application and apparently one is coming soon (or at least an announcement) (within 1-2 weeks).

With it only launching today and having over 200 members already is a promising sign. I strongly encourage the SharePoint community to sign up for this social network and give it a whirl. Hopefully it stays strong and continues to grow with great new features.

Great job Arno (and anyone else that helped you bring this to fruition) and check out my SPoint.me profile page!

I came across a service called ClusterShot a few months ago that gives photographers an outlet for selling their photos. The service allows a photographer to set a price but also accept offers. With the ability to import photos from other services such as RSS and Flickr it made it real easy for me to bring my photos into the service.

ClusterShot can be used for free with some limitations. I recently decided to upgrade my account to PRO status which gives me a “store front” and allows me to feature particular photos right on the landing page of my store. For $20 bucks a year it is not a bad deal.

The PRO account gives access to features such as statistics and watermarking.

I am not sure I will actually sell any photos but I decided to give it a shot.

If you are interested, feel free to check our my ClusterShot photo store at http://paulliebrand.clustershot.com. I have a few select pictures in there now and will expand it over time.

Thank you for your time and support.

A few years ago after I experienced numerous hard drive failures and almost losing my entire photo collection I decided to invest in an online backup strategy. After evaluating a few options, I decided to go with IDrive and I have been extremely happy.

It costs about $4.95 per month for 150 GB of storage. One thing to note is that each file can have up to 30 different versions and the versioned files do not count against your storage limit.

The versioned files saved me a few months back when my hard drive become corrupted and all my photos were backed up in a corrupted state. I used the time-line restore feature to restore all my content to a point in time when I knew the files were good.

I basically set it and forget it and I know my photos and documents are safely being backup nightly.  They also have an option for continuous backup so as a file changes it automatically backs it up immediately.

For those of you that do not want to upload all your content the first time, they also offer a service called  Rapid Serve. For $69 a portable IDrive will be shipped to you and you can fill it up with all your content and send it back to them. Once they receive your portable IDrive all the content will be associated with your account.

The following is a overview of their features:

• Automatic Selection
• Continuous Data Protection
• True Archiving / Sync
• Open / Locked File Backup
• Mapped Drive Backup
• IDrive Explorer
• Search and Restore
• Time-line restore
• Versioning
• Retrieve from any location
• Web based backup management
• Enhanced security with 128-bit SSL encryption on transfers, 256-bit AES encryption on storage with a user defined key that is not stored anywhere on IDrive server.

I cannot recommend IDrive enough to anyone who wants to keep their data safe and offsite.

Swift Dixshun recently released his latest hip-hop album, “Accidentally on Purpose.” Why do I care? Although I am not the biggest fan of hip-hop, this album has some personal significance to me. My younger brother, Mark Liebrand, produced 2 songs and recorded about 6 others from this album.

This is a momentous accomplishment for him and if you are in the least bit interested in hip-hop or simply want to support their movement, check this album out!

You can follow my brother on Twitter @dsproductionz and his website is http://www.darksideproductionz.com

The album is available on iTunes, Napster, Amazon MP3, MySpace Music, LimeWire, Lala, Nokia, Rhapsody and also at www.swiftdixshun.com.

Congratulations to you on this release!  Cannot wait to see what you do next

Nothing like receiving an email from an end-user that reads:

Why do I receive a message from Outlook that says “The owner deleted the document on the server. Please contact your administrator.” on most of my emails that have been archived?

Let me take a step back for a moment. About two months ago, we implemented Open Text’s Email Management for Exchange 10, latest and greatest release, in our organization. The method we chose to archive email was via Microsoft Exchange 2007 Managed folders leaving a stub behind in Exchange.

Overall, everything is working as expected.

Fast forward to December. We start receiving reports that some email that has been archived can no longer be retrieved and users are getting the error outlined above.

We determined that nothing is wrong with our configuration (that we can see) after triple checking it. Further investigation (with the assistance of AppTier) determined that the product had a bug and a major one.

The Problem

The Personal Email Volume (“PEV”) Cleanup job was flagging newly archived emails as orphaned and 28 days later were being purged from LiveLink and we have been able to reproduce this issue in multiple environments. When have opened a ticket with OpenText support and after they were able to replicate the issue it been flagged as an official bug.

The strange thing about this bug is that it only impacts emails stored in the root folder of managed folders. A number of our users created sub-folders and archived their emails there and are not impacted.

For now, we decided to disable the PEV job to prevent the problem from perpetuating and are anxiously waiting for a fix/resolution from OpenText support.

We are also trying to determine if this problem existed in version Open Text Email Management for Exchange 9.7.5.

What a way to start the new year – I’ll report back once I get notice of a fix/resolution.

1/12/2010

I received word from Open Text today that this has been confirmed as a bug and will most likely be issuing a security alert and patch by the end of next week.

2/22/2010

The patch that resolves this issue is EXA-1000-001.

The Microsoft SharePoint Conference 2009 (“SPC09”) has finally come to a close and I hope to wrap up my thoughts about what I saw at the conference in this post.

I first need to say that this has by far been the best conference I have attended. This is not necessarily because of all the great content but more of the social aspects that surfaced during the conference. With all the communication happening on Twitter around the announcements, features, thoughts, etc, about the sessions I felt like I was in many rooms at once. I also met many great people due to the communications we had via Twitter. Also, thanks to Jeremy Thake (@jthake) and SharePointDevWiki for providing a site with all the Twitter session codes (http://bit.ly/xO5ur). These made it extremely easy to track the sessions you were interested in and provide thoughts of sessions you attended.

Overall the session content was really good and I was pleased with what I got out of it. Having the session videos available a few days after the session ends will make it extremely useful to go back and rewatch sessions or view ones you missed.

I felt that many of the improvements made to SharePoint 2010 are targeted to the developer / admin in the SharePoint world. Sure, the new ribbon interface impacts end-users greatly – I just do not feel they are going to truly understand the improvements we are getting with SharePoint 2010.

Some of the high level features / enhancements I am really excited about are:

• New Ribbon Interface and Dialog Infrastructure
• Sandbox Solutions
• Developer Dashboard
• Client Object Model
• REST
• SPLINQ! aka “LINQ for SharePoint”
• Improved Central Administration
• Performance and Throttling
• Managed Metadata
• Business Connectivity Services and External Lists
• PowerShell for SharePoint
• Service Application Framework and new architecture topology options
• Additional Event Receivers (Add / Delete on Lists and Add on webs)
• SQL Logging Database
• Developing on your client PC (Windows Vista / Windows 7 only)
• Visual Studio 2010 SharePoint tools

Some other things that I saw / heard throughout the conference that I think is going to benefit our end-users:

• Pagination now factors into filter of views
• Column Validation
• Insure Column Uniqueness
• Web Pages embedded anywhere in wiki pages
• Lookup Lists can now bring back multiple columns
• Referential Integrity between lists
• Editing the New, Edit, View form pages right from the browser

Frankly, there is so many new improvements it is almost impossible to list them all. Hopefully more content will start surfacing now that the NDA’s have been listed and has more people get their hands on the SharePoint 2010 beta.

Client PC Development Thoughts

This is probably one of the most requested things from a SharePoint developer and it is finally here. Yes, it requires Windows Vista or Windows 7. Since SharePoint 2010 requires 64-bit, you will be forced to run the x64 versions of those operating systems. Also, it was mentioned at the conference that 8GB was the minimum recommended memory to have allocated to your machine for SharePoint development.

Depending on your current hardware this may or may not be a difficult sell for your management. Either way, this is something I think many developers are going to want to jump on.

Beta Availability

The SharePoint 2010 Beta 2 was announced at the conference and will be available sometime in November. Some dates I heard was November 15th and November 23th. Just be patient – it is coming.

RTM Availability

April 2010 was thrown around by some people at the conference as the availability of the final RTM version of SharePoint 2010 (Unconfirmed).

That’s all I have for now. More to come in the coming weeks. Please say tuned.

Generally speaking, most of what was shown during the keynote can be seen in the SharePoint 2010 Overview videos available on the website. However, here are a few things that caught my attention that I am not sure I knew:

• Full development support on Windows Vista/Windows 7
• Development Sandbox environments

I am also really excited to see more on the Business Connectivity Services (“BCS”) – previously the BDC. It seems the whole process around getting SQL information into has been simplified dramatically.

I am going to sign off for now – more to come through out the week.

I must have been living under a rock to only have been shown a feature of Gmail that has been around for awhile. I am not even sure what the “feature” is called but I am going to totally start using it when signing up for sites that may potentially generate a lot of spam.

Essentially, if you Gmail address is first.last@gmail.com you can add a plus (+) after your alias and it will still make it to your account. For example, first.last+spamtest@gmail.com.

The email will still come to you as expected:

If the site starts spamming you with unwanted information, you can now create a filter within Gmail to handle those situations.

A co-worker pointed this out to me today and thought I would share in case others do not know it exists.

References:

http://www.askstudent.com/google/email-tips-and-tricks-using-google-gmail/

http://codeforfuture.com/2009/06/24/how-to-alter-your-gmail-id-before-submitting-it-to-any-doubtful-site/

I have decided to shutdown http://www.wsswiki.com and all traffic will now be directed to SharePoint Dev Wiki (http://www.sharepointdevwiki.com) – a site maintained by Jeremy Thake (@jthake). This weekend, I plan on publishing some of my articles from WSSWiki on SharePoint Dev Wiki.

I believe the SharePoint Dev Wiki has good content that all SharePoint developers and administrators should use and I hope redirecting my traffic will help this community site grow.

Thank you!