Well I’ve now moved jobs, I’m now working for a company called Intelligent Decisioning (www.id-live.com).
They are a Nottingham based Microsoft gold partner specialising in SharePoint CRM/Workflow solutions.
I am working on some pretty awesome stuff so stay tuned! 
I have been configuring STSADM backups today on a few SharePoint & WSS WFE servers to backup to a file share. These have been scheduled using the task scheduler and some batch files.
I had read before that the service account running the SQL instance would need modify permissions on the on the file share (both Sharing and Security permissions), and I am sure this is how we have it configured for another server.
However when I executed the backup it kept failing with the error message –
Object objectName failed in event OnBackup. For more information, see the error log located in the backup directory. SqlException: Cannot open backup device Operating system error 5(Access is denied.)
I did some searching around and eventually came across this TechNet thread –
It seems that modify permissions is not enough and that the SQL service account needs full control permissions on the file share. I changed the permissions to full control and hey presto the backup worked!
Hope this helps.
Had to write a post about this as this is great news for .NET developers who fancy developing apps for the iPhone.
MonoTouch is a platform that has been developed by Novell allowing .NET C# based applications to run on the iPhone and take advantage of the iPhone’s API’s.
Here is the original post that I read over at modmyi –
http://modmyi.com/forums/iphone-news/684724-filling-language-gap-app-development.html
And here is the link to the official site –
There appears to be a trial available so I might give it a go Although the base version is very expensive at $399!
Edit – I’ve just noticed you have to run it on a mac which is annoying if you only have a windows machine like me.
Bit of a plug for Quest software here but their tool to migrate SharePoint subsite’s, site collections and content has now been fully released. This post is slightly late though as the official release was on the 6th August 2009!
The official page is here –
http://www.quest.com/migration-manager-for-sharepoint/
And this blog post by the quest team talks about some of the features –
Their previous version of the software was called the ‘Reorganization Wizard’, we ran into problems moving subsites around within our farm and this software came to the rescue.
I would urge you all to check it out as its packed full of useful functionality.
I recently wrote a console application which looped through the workflows running on my SharePoint site and showed the status of each one. When I refer to status I mean the same status that is displayed under the workflow column e.g. In Progress, Error occurred etc
To get the workflow status in code you need to use the enumeration ‘SPWorkflowStatus’, which will return one of the following numeric values:
public enum SPWorkflowStatus
{
NotStarted = 0,
FailedOnStart = 1,
InProgress = 2,
ErrorOccurred = 3,
StoppedByUser = 4,
Completed = 5,
Max = 15,
}
Hope this helps!
Well I haven’t blog posted in a while as things have been pretty hectic for me lately. I am going to be moving jobs in October and will be working as a SharePoint/.NET developer.
The company is called Intelligent Decisioning Ltd, their website is –
They are a Microsoft Gold partner based in Nottingham offering SharePoint/CRM solutions. I am excited about the move but also will be sad to leave my old place.
Expect an update nearer the time .
I have been searching for a decent blog post/tutorial on how to enable .NET 3.5 in a MOSS site for a while now.
I first came across the following blog post that describes how to enable ASP AJAX 1.0 in MOSS –
http://sharepoint.microsoft.com/blogs/mike/Lists/Posts/Post.aspx?ID=3
So I modified the web.config as per the above guide and it works great!
…However the .NET framework 3.5 contains a newer version of AJAX which I’m sure would be the preferred choice to use.
I finally came across this post by Tobias Zimmergren where he walks through the changes that need to made to the web.config –
Thanks Toby! As I understand there are other less ‘manual’ ways of doing this that do not involve directly editing the web.config but these can have their problems and I think that the manual way feels more thorough.
Hope this helps someone!
I have had this problem on one of our servers for some time now and am still trying to figure out what causes it.
When you go to the ‘Solution Management’ screen of Central Administration and retract a solution (wsp) it seems to retract ok but the status of the solution remains ‘Deployed’. When you try and delete the solution in the GUI you then get an error saying that you must retract the solution first – but it is retracted!
To get round this you can run an stsadm command to physically delete the solution:
STSADM –o deletesolution –name ‘YourSolution.wsp’ –override
The override flag is needed to force the removal of the solution as SharePoint thinks it is still deployed even when it is retracted.
If anyone has any ideas of what the problem with the GUI might be or how I can solve it please let me know.
Hope this helps
Well I’ve finally upgraded my trusty 2G iPhone to a 3G one – I couldn’t justify the price of the 3GS so went with a 3G 16GB one in white as you don’t see as many of these as the black ones.
I opted to buy the phone outright and use my o2 simplicity sim card as I think the prices for the iPhone contracts are just crazy!
I’ve been using it for about a week so far and I love it! The best thing is the sheer increase in speed over my old 2G one which was so slow browsing the web etc on GPRS or EDGE. I prefer the screen on the 3G iPhone and the flush headphone socket so I can use normal headphones and not just the apple ones.
As I’ve installed lots of apps since I’ve started using the new 3G device, I thought I would share a list of top rated ones:
reQall –For managing tasks/notes etc
myPhone –Syncing facebook pictures/birthday’s with your iPhone contacts
Flight Control –So simple yet so addictive, in this game you have to land as many aircraft as possible by drawing routes on the screen to the runway
Let me know what you think of the above apps and the iPhone 3G in general
Recently we had a problem with our WSS environment when we tried to move the databases from one SQL server to another. I used the standard stsadm restore option to restore the individual web applications & site collections.
Everything appeared to work great and I re-deployed our .wsp’s until one of the users notified me that their alerts didn’t seem to work. I double checked their alerts on the site and they were set up ok – ‘Immediate’ alerts on a documents list.
When I tried to subscribe myself a new alert, I would receive the initial subscription email but not the actual alert.
I did a bit of digging around and it turns out there that there is a known bug when using stsadm or the GUI to restore a web application – the Timer Jobs don’t get restored! When I check the timer job definitions page in central admin I could only see timer jobs for those web applications that were created since the restore.
This is well document in Dave Wollerman’s blog –
See here:
or here:
Now it seems there is a Post-SP1 hotfix available here that will fix the issue (KB941922) – http://support.microsoft.com/kb/941422
I cannot confirm however if that hotfix works as I manually created the web applications again keeping the IIS sites & content databases, this then recreated the missing timer job definitions and hey presto the alerts stopped working!
Hope this helps anyone with similar issues!
