Hello folks -i am harry brelsford, author of Windows Small Buinsess Server 2003 Best Practices and I am posting up a few pages a day of the "purple book" until SBS 2008 ships. Today we look at some advanced topics in Windows SharePoint Services in the SBS 2003 product. Good stuff Maynard!

cheers...harrybbbb

Harry Brelsford, ceo of SMB Nation www.smbnation.com and your fellow Microsoft Small Business Specialist (SBSC), MBA, MCSE, MCT and other non-sense.

PS - we got a hellva SBS 2008 and Essential Business Server 2008 (EBS) launch party happin' in Seattle in early october. Check out my Web site for event details!

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Advanced WSS Topics

I’m still planting WSS seeds for you to march forward with, and this section cultivates a garden of advanced SharePoint topics. These include meeting and greeting the options on the Modify Shared Page menu, learning how to use the management and statistics, server-side stuff and Office 2003 integration and using SQL Server with WSS.

Modify Shared Page

You’ve actually already peeked at this option in an earlier procedure, but this area warrants more discussion. Here I’ll explain each of the options.

•          ;          &nbs p;  Add Web Parts. You’re quite familiar with this option because you added a Web Part earlier in the chapter.

•          ;          &nbs p;  Design this Page. It’s human nature and certainly the nature of SBSers to fiddle around. The SBS development team has provided a great start with the default Home page, but experience has shown that SBSers ask the following question early and often: “How can I modify the Home page?” Obviously, adding Web Parts (above) is one way. The other is to fiddle with the design via the option. Go ahead and play with it under the SPRINGERS methodology, as you can’t do any real harm.

•          ;          &nbs p;  Modify Shared Web Parts. This option is to modify existing Home page elements, including the announcements, site image, and link.

 

BEST PRACTICE: A popular modification right here amongst SBSers is to modify the site image. You can make the page better reflect the

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company’s image by displaying the company logo instead of the Windows Small Business Server 2003 logo. See the default site image (Windows Small Business Server 2003) in the upper right corner of Figure 7-16.

•          ;          &nbs p;  Shared View. This reveals the shared view that you are accustomed to at this point. A change made to the Home page is observed by every­one. This is the default view in SBS 2003.

•          ;          &nbs p;  Personal View. There is some real power in WSS in creating per­sonal views, where different users have a different WSS experience. Remember earlier when I spoke to the EIS creation process to report financial information. This is how you might do that, allowing executives to see sensitive financial information that isn’t appropri­ate for the rest of the staff.

 

Management and Statistics

Another thing to learn all about is the Management and Statistics area. From the home page, this is easily accessed from clicking Site Settings followed by Go to Site Administration under Administration. You will now see the Top-level Site Administration page. The Management and Statistics section has a link that allows you to view site usage data, which provide the metrics that let SBSers know how effective their efforts are in delivering a compelling business portal. This is analogous to some Web monitor tools (e.g., hit counters) that are used in the world of e-commerce.

WSS Backup and Restore

There was a very interesting and timely discussion on the Yahoo! SBS newsgroup in mid-December 2003 that discussed backup options for WSS in SBS 2003. This is a dialog between two leading SBSers (note the following public discussion is unedited):

SBSer #1 thoughtfully comments with the initial posting:

Generally, if we restore an individual SharePoint file,

we need to have a file-based backup image of your SharePoint documents. As I know, there are two ways to

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perform file-based backup for your SharePoint database. For your convenience, I included the methods below:

Method 1. Use NTBackup.

===================== According to our test, we can map the folders under \\companyweb

<file://\\companyweb> as network drives now. Thus, we can use NTBackup to back up or restore the files in these folders (network drives) directly. To do so,

please follow the stepsbelow:

1.   Map the \\Companyweb\Foldername <file:// \\Companyweb\Foldername> folder as a network drive

2.   Run NTBackup and back up the network drive.

3.   When you need to restore one file in this folder, simply run NTBackup to restore

 

Method 2. Use Stsadm.exe.

===================== If you have enabled the recovery of SharePoint files, you can recover a

file or list item by restoring the entire site from a backup to a subsite of http://companyweb, selecting the file or list item that you want to restore, extracting

it, and uploading it to its original location. To enable the recovery of individual SharePoint files, please use the following procedure:

 

1. Click Start, click Control Panel, click Scheduled Tasks, and then click Add Scheduled Task.

 

2. Click Next on the first page of the Scheduled Task Wizard.

 

3. Click Browse, go to &#xSy;stemDrive%\Program

 

Files\Common Files\MicrosoftShared\Web server extensions\60\Bin, and then double-click Stsadm.exe.

 

4. Select how often you want this task to run, and then click Next.

 

5. Select the time you want to run the schedule, and then click Next.

 

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1.   Enter administrator credentials, and then click Next.

2.   Select the Open advanced properties when I click finish check box, and then click Finish.

3.   On the Task tab in the dialog box that appears, in the Run box, type “&#xSy;stemDrive%\Program files\Common files\Microsoft shared\Web server extensions\60\Bin\Stsadm.exe” -o backup -url http:// Companyweb –filename target path -overwrite, where target path is where you save the backup of your internal Web site. Click OK. You must type the quotation marks.

 

If you have enabled this before, you can follow the steps below to restore the missing files:

 

1. Click Start, click Command Prompt, and then type “&#xSy;stemDrive%\Program files\Common files\Microsoft shared\Web server extensions\60\Bin\Stsadm.exe” -o createsiteinnewdb -url http://companyweb/sites/RestoredSite -ownerlogin DOMAIN\administrator -owneremail administrator@DOMAIN.local

 

<mailto:administrator@DOMAIN.local> -databasename STS_RESTORE, where DOMAIN is your server domain and administrator@DOMAIN.local <mailto:administrator@DOMAIN.local> is your administrator¡¯s e-mail address. Include the quotation marks as part of the path. Press ENTER.

 

2. Type “&#xSy;stemDrive%\Program files\Common files\Microsoft shared\Web server extensions\60\Bin\Stsadm.exe” -o restore -url http://Companyweb/Sites/Restoredsite -filename target path -overwrite, where target path is the location where you chose to save your SharePoint backup. Include the quotation marks as part of the path. Press ENTER.

 

3. Open Internet Explorer, and in the address bar, type

 

http://Companyweb/Sites/Restoredsite. The site that appears is the same as your company Web site.

1.   In the restored site, navigate to the missing file.

2.   Right-click the file, select Save Target As, and then select a location to which to save the file.

3.   Repeat steps 4 and 5 for all missing files.

4.   Open your company Web site, navigate to the location where the missing files should be, and then on the SharePoint toolbar, click Upload Document.

 

NOTE: The second method is provided in the SBS Server help. You can findthis by the following steps:

1.   Open Server Management.

2.   Click Standard Management->Backup.

3.   Click Restore Sharepoint files in the right pane. However, if you have not performed either method above to enable file-based backup, I am afraid that we may have

 

to restore the entire database.

SBSer #2 thoughtfully replies:

Just realize that there are certain things to be aware of regarding method #1:

 

1)

it is not a method supported by the SBS Dev

Team

 

2)

you need to have a separate network place on

 

your server pointing to the each sharepoint document library, etc. you want to back up individual files from. Note that you cannot have a single network place

just pointing to companyweb 3) NTBackup will not restore files back into the Sharepoint database. You will have to restore to an alternate location, then manually upload the file back into Sharepoint.

SBSer #1 reverts back and ends the thread:

Have to laugh though... that’s a cut and paste from a Microsoft support person posting.... but I have heard that #1 is not the preferred method. Thus my comment about using #2.

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BEST PRACTICE: Be sure to catch the comment about the Restore SharePoint Files link under Backup (Server Management, Standard Management). Right now, please click over and read the Small Business Server Help and Information page (that appears upon click) on this topic.

Server-Side: SharePoint Central Administration

Much of what we have discussed so far has been on the client computer-side. You’ve interacted with WSS from Internet Explorer from NormH’s PRESIDENT machine. But there is a server-side to WSS you should know about. In this section, you will observe the file types that are blocked from uploading and learn about the native antivirus protection. You will correctly use SharePoint Central Administration to do this (see my Best Practice in a moment about the best server-side tools to use).

1         &nbs p;          Log on as Administrator to SPRINGERS1 with the password Husky9999!.

2         &nbs p;          Click Start, Administrative Tools, SharePoint Central Adminis­tration.

3         &nbs p;          On the Central Administration page, select Manage blocked file types under Security Configuration.

4         &nbs p;          Observe the default file extensions that are blocked. You can add or delete file extensions to this list. These are file types that can not be uploaded into WSS. Click OK.

 

BEST PRACTICE: Compare the list of blocked file extensions here compared to SMTP sink blocked file types discussed in Chapter 6 (see the attachment blocking discussion) and shown back in Figure 4-14 when the E-mail and Internet Connection Wizard (EICW) was completed.

1         &nbs p;          On the Central Administration page, select Configure antivirus settings under Security Configuration.

2         &nbs p;          Click the Show me more information link and read about the require­ments for virus protection in WSS. You can then click the About virus protection link to learn even more. Close the help window.

 

 

1         &nbs p;          Select the following antivirus settings: Scan documents on upload, Scan documents on download, Attempt to clean infected documents.

2         &nbs p;          Click OK.

3         &nbs p;          Close the Central Administration page.

 

BEST PRACTICE: In Chapter 11, you will be strongly encouraged to download and install a trial version of Trend Micro’s PortalProtect for SharePoint, a WSS compliant application that will exploit the antivirus settings you just configured.

BEST PRACTICE: When I was teaching SharePoint technologies on the Spring 2003 GTM hands-on lab tour, a common challenge for students was to keep it all “straight” and remember where they were in WSS. You’ve already seen at least four ways to interact with WSS:

 

•           Springer Spaniels Limited Home page when you launch Internet

 

Explorer on a client computer

•        &nbs p;          &nb sp;  Server Management console on the SBS 2003 server machine (see Internal Web Site under Standard Management)

•        &nbs p;          &nb sp;  SharePoint Central Administration on the server. USE THIS ONE for administrative management of WSS.

•        &nbs p;          &nb sp;  Microsoft SharePoint Administrator. BEWARE: this is FrontPage Server Extensions management, not truly WSS. DO NOT USE THIS ONE. This is a distant sister technology to WSS.

 

There is actually a fourth way to interact with WSS: Web folders. To see this, go to a client machine (e.g., PRESIDENT) and launch My Network Places from the Start button. Observe the Web folders related to CompanyWeb (the default WSS virtual server in SBS 2003). At this point, you should see General Documents and Jones Family.