Important Problem with SharePoint 2007 Service Pack 2

Attention: Important Information on Service Pack 2 We take product quality seriously and make every effort to avoid and resolve issues that adversely impact our customers. Unfortunately, we have recently discovered a bug with Service Pack 2 (SP2) that affects all customers that have deployed it for SharePoint Server 2007.

During the installation of SP2, a product expiration date is improperly activated. This means SharePoint will expire as though it was a trial installation 180 days after SP2 is deployed. The activation of the expiration date will not affect the normal function of SharePoint up until the expiration date passes. Furthermore, product expiration 180 days after SP2 installation will not affect customer’s data, configuration or application code but will render SharePoint inaccessible for end-users.

We are working to release a hotfix to automatically fix this issue. A manual work-around is currently available and involves customers re-entering their Product ID number (PID) on the Convert License Type page in Central Administration. For more information and detailed steps please read this KB article.

We want to assure our customers that this issue does not impact data integrity or their SharePoint deployment in any other way. .

For your convenience, below are some answers to questions that you may have and we will update this blog post with a link to the hotfix as soon as it’s available. .

Read more on Microsoft SharePoint Team Blog

SharePoint Tips #2

How to find those checked out items within Sharepoint

A month or so ago I put up a post about how to find checked out items within a Sharepoint site.  This particular error tends to bring up problems with Content Deployment, as CD cannot occur if there are any items checked out.

Unfortunately there is no inbuilt method to find these items for an Administrator, the only way within the standard Sharepoint interface if that on the Site Actions menu, each user can check if there are any items still checked out and quickly check them back in.  Training users to do this can be problematic however, and sometimes it is just easier to point them at the items that are still checked out.

I had a query to do this, but one of the readers has suggested a much better query than my own for finding these items :

SELECT AllUserData.tp_DirName, 'http://SiteName/' + AllUserData.tp_DirName, AllUserData.tp_LeafName,
case when AllUserData.tp_ContentType = 'Item'
then 'http://SiteName/' + AllUserData.tp_DirName + '/DispForm.aspx?ID=' + AllUserData.tp_LeafName
else 'http://SiteName/' + AllUserData.tp_DirName + '/' + AllUserData.tp_LeafName
end as Link,AllUserData.tp_ContentType, AllUserData.nvarchar1, AllUserData.nvarchar2, AllUserData.tp_ModerationStatus, AllUserData.tp_DeleteTransactionId, AllUserData.tp_IsCurrent
FROM AllUserData AllUserData
WHERE (AllUserData.tp_ModerationStatus=2)
AND (AllUserData.tp_DeleteTransactionId=0x0)
AND (AllUserData.tp_IsCurrent=1)
ORDER BY AllUserData.tp_DirName, AllUserData.tp_LeafName

Just replace the http://SiteName/ with the url to your Site, and use this on the database of your Web Application and you are good to go. Thank you very much to rwoods@city.pg.bc.ca for supplying this great query.

SharePoint Tips #1

Using and customizing a Search Center in Office SharePoint Server 2007

The SharePoint 2007 Search Center with tabs offers several benefits over the search box found on all non-administration pages of your SharePoint sites:

• It can be centralized or located within the collaborative environments.
• It uses Web Parts, not field controls, and therefore provides an easily customizable set of user interfaces without writing code.
• It is a separate site, which supports inherited or unique permissions.

The Search Center has no default content other than the three default pages—the search page, the advanced search page and the results page. It is a SharePoint site and, as such, can contain other pages and content. Those three pages are the default.aspx, advanced.aspx and results.aspx.

We introduce these three pages in the linked article Using a Search Center in Office SharePoint Server 2007 and discuss how to customize them in the following linked articles.
* The linked articles require Adobe Reader.

Customize the Search Page in an Office SharePoint Server 2007 Search Center Site

The Search Page in a SharePoint Server 2007 Search Center site is a Web Part page with two default Web Parts, the Search Box and a Content Editor Web Part.

The preceding linked article discusses how to modify a Search Page in a SharePoint Server 2007 Search Center site and the Web Part settings associated to the two default Web Parts. We will also discuss the recommendations and best practices for additional modifications and suggested Web Parts that can be added to this page.

Customize the Advanced Search Page in an Office SharePoint Server 2007 Search Center Site

Customizing the Advanced Search page in a SharePoint Server 2007 Search Center site will involve understanding the page construction, the existing and available Web Parts and how to use them. The unique configuration required by your organization may require multiple Advanced Search pages for different purposes, different users or different SharePoint Server 2007 Search Centers.

The preceding linked article covers the steps to customize these pages and best practices and recommendations for making the advanced search pages for your Search Center site more effective.

Customize Search Results Pages in an Office SharePoint Server 2007 Search Center Site

The results page for any search is a very important page as it does the heavy lifting of the query process. A SharePoint Server 2007 Search Center results page is the most complex of the three default search pages with a total of seven Web Part zones and 10 Web Parts.

The preceding linked article describes how a search is executed and what information is passed back to the Search result page. You will learn how to customize the search results page, read about the available Web Parts, how to configure those Web Parts and learn best practices for modifying this important page.

Adding Pages to an Office SharePoint Server 2007 Search Center Site

One of the search customization tasks that is certain to be required in a SharePoint Server 2007 Search Center site will be creating additional search pages for your Search Center, especially if you have a central Search Center for all users. That is the focus of this post.

The Search Center “light” template supports the collaboration features of Windows SharePoint Services 3.0, but only contains three pages by default:

·         The Search Page

·         The Advance Search Page

·         The Results Page

In the preceding linked article we discuss the mechanics of creating new pages, customizing the pages and some best practices. Since there are many advantages in using SharePoint Designer to create additional pages we include a light discussion on its use as well.