SharePoint 2010: My Site Root Deletion/Restoration

So playing around in our My Sites and discovered a My Site for SP_Farm.  Went in and deleted as a typical site collection.  BIG MISTAKE.  Apparently when browsing other My Sites you are view a layered root site (/).  By deleting this I broke My Sites for everyone.  To resolve I had to recreate the Site Collection (followed post at Jerry Orman's Blog SharePoint My Site link stops redirecting users to their Personal Site)

1. Browse Central Administration > Application Management 
1. Click Create Site Collection 
2. Select the My Site Web Application 
3. Set the Title to My Site
4. For URL, select the "/" option for the root 
5. Select the My Site Host site template on the Enterprise tab 
6. Set the SharePoint System account as the owner. 
7. Click OK

That fixed it (whew thought I would have to recreate all the My Sites from a backup last week).

If you want to remove those service account My Sites there are two ways (GUI /  PS):

1. GUI (Central Administration)
1.  Start > All Programs > Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Products > SharePoint 2010 Central Administration
2. Application Management
3. Delete Site Collection
4. Select Site from Drop Down
5. Delete
2. PS (Power Shell)
1. Start > All Programs > Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Products > SharePoint 2010 Management Shell
2. STSAdm.exe command-line (stsadm -o deletesite -url http://mysite/personal/bobsmith)

Check out How-To write up on SpiceWorks:
http://community.spiceworks.com/how_to/show/47509-sharepoint-2010-my-site-root-deletion-restoration 

Windchill 10.0 Debug Logging

We have been having some issues with our WindChill/PTC Creo system and have had to reach out to their tech support.  Through this issue I have learned how to enable debug logging and what log files they typically need to resolve cases.  By knowing this information you can speed up the resolution process by including debug logs with initial case opening message instead of waiting for the tech to request.

1. Access server running Windchill
2. Start > All Programs > Windchill_10.0 > Windchill Shell
3. Enter: xconfmanager -s wt.inf.team.verbose=true -t codebase/wt.properties –p
• Set to false to disable

Now reproduce what ever caused your error and you will have a nice debug log to send.  

The logs location may vary. Ours are located in [Drive]:\PTC\Winchill_10.0\Windchill\logs

NeverFail: Disaster Recovery shouldn’t run on late nights and coffee alone (Webinar)

Summary of Webinar presented by Neverfail: Speaker Josh Mazgelis

This webinar covered following three topics plus preview of new Neverfail product

1. Dependency Mapping
2. DR planning
3. Flavors of protection
4. Neverfail product

1. Mapping is important
1. Business view
1. Managers only see the Business needs (Services)
2. There is little to no between Business needs and Infrastructure Support
3. Don't understand Infrastructure Support is like insurance, only see money vanishing
2. How IT sees it
1. Inventory of servers, hosts, storage
2. Don't understand the Business needs only to keep everything running
3. May/May not understand what services are important/critical
4. Very difficult to know if Backup Continuity / Disaster Recovery (BC/DR) is sufficient
5. Difficult to justify money for better BC/DR
3. Results
1. IT staff spends more time determining how things work
1. late nights figuring out how things work
2. IT staff spends more time reacting/repairing when services break
3. Business wants to know why took so long to restore/recovery
4. Business wants to know why data is missing from restore
2. DR Planning
1. Planning originates from Business needs
1. Business owners need to identify key services
2. Business owners need to define target SLA
1. Not IT
2. How to do this 
1. Start with what services are important/critical
2. Identify components that keep these service running
3. Identify the dependencies that support components/services
3. Build DR to support Business services
1. Easier to justify spending for application dependencies
2. Reduce spending on extraneous infrastructure
• By determining what levels of SLA (typically 2-3 for a company) can break services down and adjust resources to provide the needed protection
3. Understanding challenges
1. Off-target Recovery Plans
1. With virtualization became easy to spread basic protection across Virtual Infrastructure
1. May not meet Recovery Plan Objective (RPO) / Recovery Time Objective (RTO)
2. May over protect smaller systems thus wasting resources
3. Hard to balance funds to protection
2. Spot solutions
1. Don't provide complete protection
• May protect Oracle database extermly well but not the SharePoint application that allows retrival and input
• Database availability means nothing if no application to use it
2. Keeping up with changes
1. Visualization accelerated the pace of change
1. New servers come online within minutes to hours versus days to weeks
2. Old servers become abandoned forgotten easier as they are not physical without monitoring virtual enviroment easy to feed "zombie" system vitila resources
3. VM's easily move between hosts and protection schemes
• One host may be connected to a SAN were other is not
2. Rouge IT ushers in undocumented changes
1. Business units create "Ghost IT" infrastructure
• Mac mini with server applications
2. Cloud services compliment or replace internal resources
1. Dropbox
3. There's just a whole lot going on
1. It is difficult enough keeping up with projects and issue without worrying about BC/DR updates
3. Knowing where you stand
1. DR plan last thing considered
1. Doing more with less truely means there is more that doesn't get done
2. BC/DR plans are rarely updated as changes are made
2. Even if you have a plan hard to know status
1. BCDR consultants could be used but not always through enough to catch everything
2. Testing plans (not when there is an emergency)
• Monthly/Qtrly/Semi-Annual/somthing
4. Recovery Tool Taste Testing
1. Basic backup & recovery
2. Replicate of VM images/stores
3. Trad. server cluster
4. Replication with stand-by & failover
5. Every blend own characteristics
1. Different RTO/RPO
2. Protection from different kinds of failures
3. widely varying cost to protection ratio
6. Delicate Balance
1. SLA 
1. Business wants to meet certain SLA;s
2. Increasing # of threats to business continuity
3. Everyone's stuff important, hard to determine
2. Budgetary constraints
1. Face It: Protection costs money, time, resources
2. Hard to justify expense
3. Not everything is going to get unlimited protection
7. Building a better Coffee Maker
1. Understand business needs
1. Reference actual business needs and requirements
2. Estimate application cost of downtime
• Easier to justify funding when you know the cost
3. Fully map out service dependencies
• Ensure a small server/service running on other server is not missed that breaks entire service
2. Apply protection appropriately
1. Good, Fast, Cheap (Pick any two)
• Never going to find a perfect solution
3. Monitor results
1. Regular testing
2. Develop automation

Neverfail IT Continuity Architect

1. Dashboard
1. Progress and Summary reports
1. Automatically inventories and analyzes IT infrastructure
2. Summarizes availability and likelihood to meet SLA's
2. Multiple Heatmap views of Inventory
1. color coded by analysis state, protection, or tier ranking
2. Bigger boxes indicate more dependent entities
3. Create and define Biz services (SLA)
1. combine dependent entities
4. Dependency Graphs
1. view inbound and outbound dependencies for any entity
2. Learn More
1. IT Continuity Architect tech preview
• http://marketing.neverfailgroup.com/architectcomingsoon.html
2. IT Continuity Architect introduction video
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CCclnIxMAoU&feature=youtu.be
3. IT Continuity Architect - Discovery and Dependencies
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=agzOP8sNuSU&feature=youtu.be

ShoreTel Agent Login/Logoff via phones

We have a small number of users that are part of some groups within our ShoreTel System (Sales/Customer Service).

**Note Following only works if you have ShoreTel Workgroup Agent/Supervisor Access Licenses: else ShoreTel Administrator must manually make changes**

Recently there have been more questions on logging in and out as an agent during scheduled times. Below is a quick write up covering major models.

IP 212k:

• Press Options > [Voice Mail Password] > #
• Select "Agent State" via Custom Button
• Select State [Logged In / Logged Out / Wrap-up] via Custom Button
• Press Menu button to exit

IP 230/230g/265/560/560g/565g/:

• Press Options > [Voice Mail Password] > #
• Select "Agent State" via Up/Down Arrow control or press 5
• Select State via Up/Down Arrow control
• Logged In [1]
• Logged Out [2]
• Wrap-Up [3]
• Press Done Softkey

Feature not available on following phones:
IP 110, IP 115, IP 210, IP 655 , IP 8000

For users on non-supported phones Agent status will need to be updated by ShoreTel Administrator.

Truth In IT: BackUp Seminar Notes to come

Morning everyone,

Have a lot going on but just want to let you all know I attended a great seminar (free) put on by Truth in IT yesterday.  Guest speaker was Curtis Preston (Mr. Backup).  Learned a lot and will have several posts on more in depth topics but keep an eye out over the next week I should get a nice overview of the event.

If possible I highly recommend attending any TruthInIT events that come to your area. I have attended three in the past year and each one is very informational.

SharePoint 2010: Aggregating Announcements

As part of our SharePoint Setup we decided we wanted the ability to aggregate / bubble up / consolidate announcements from multiple sites to our Main Page.  The following is how we accomplished this task while installing simple way for users to control what is displayed.

To start we added custom site columns to top level site that added controls of what was displayed on main page, when and for how long.

1. Launch browser to top level site (in our case http://intranet/)
2. Site Actions > Site Settings
3. Galleries > Site content types
4. List Content Types > Announcement
5. Columns > Add from new site column
1. Name and Type
1. Name: Display on Home Page (Y/N)
2. Type: Yes/No
2. Group
1. Group: Custom Columns or create a new one
3. Additional Column Settings
1. Description: Option to have announcement display on Main Page
2. Default Value: No
• This requires users to select Yes for announcement to be displayed on Home Page otherwise it only displays on their site
4. Update List and Site Content Types
1. Update All content types inheriting: Yes
• This is how we populate this to all child sites
5. Click Okay
6. Columns > Add from new site column
1. Name and Type
1. Name: Display Start Date
2. Type: Date and Time
2. Group
1. Group: Custom Columns or create a new one
3. Additional Column Settings
• Description: Date to Start Display on Main Page
• Required: No
• Enforce Unique: No
• Format: Date Only
• Default value: (None)
4. Update All content types inheriting: Yes
• This is how we populate this to all child sites
5. Click Okay
7. Columns > Add from new site column
1. Name and Type
1. Name: Display End Date
2. Type: Date and Time
2. Group
1. Group: Custom Columns or create a new one
3. Additional Column Settings
• Description: Date to End Display on Main Page
• Required: No
• Enforce Unique: No
• Format: Date Only
• Default value: (None)
4. Update All content types inheriting: Yes
• This is how we populate this to all child sites
5. Click Okay

Now we will setup the home page to display items from other sites.  To accomplish this we will use a Web Part: Content Query.  

1. Move back to top level site
2. Sites Actions > Edit Page
3. Click Add Web Part in desired location (for use we chose the left space)
4. Categories > Content Rollup > Web Parts > Content Query > Add
5. Click open the tool pane or Drop Down > Edit Web Part
6. Expand Query and set the following:
1. Source: Show items from all sites in this
2. List Type: Announcements
3. Content Type: 
1. Group: List Content Types
2. Item: Announcements
4. Audience Targeting: Apply as needed
5. Click Apply
7. Set filters (if desired)
1. Query > Additional Filters:
1. Display on Home Page (Y/N)
• is equal to
• [Yes]
2. Display Start Date
• is less then or equal to
• [Today]
3. Display End Date
• is greater then or equal to
• [Today]
2. Click Apply
8. Expand Appearance
1. Set Title to desired name (we used Current Announcements)
2. Click Apply > Click OK

That is it.  Now when a user creates an announcement they will have the option to set for homepage display.

For How-To write up with steps and images visit post on SpiceWorks: http://community.spiceworks.com/how_to/show/46775-sharepoint-2010-aggregating-annoucements

SharePoint 2010: Install Updates

Quick how-to to update SharePoint 2010.

**Note it is highly recommended to test all updates in test environment before deploying to your production network**

**Note Ensure you plan downtime for each update the longer between updates you wait the longer your downtime: SP2 took roughly 20-25 mins followed by restart**

1. Determine current Version and build with following SharePoint 2010 Management Shell command:
• (Get-SPFarm).buildversion
2. Review what updates need to be applied via following link:
• http://blogs.technet.com/b/sharepointjoe/archive/2011/02/01/sp2010-sharepoint-2010-build-level-and-version-numbers.aspx
3. Download update (s) for your version of SharePoint 2010
4. Move file to location accessible from SharePoint Server
5. Login to SharePoint Server to be updated
6. Browse to location of downloaded file
7. Double-Click to start installation
8. Read and Accept MS Software Licence Terms > Continue
9. Sit back and wait for installation
10. Review output
1. Some updates fail to start ProfileSynchronizationServiceInstance and will need to be manually restarted.
2. Restart if needed
11. Run following SharePoint 2010 Management Shell command as Farm Admin Account:
• Start > All Programs > Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Products > SharePoint 2010 Management Shell
• Press Shift and Right Click > Select Run as different user
• Enter Farm Admin credentials
• psconfig -cmd upgrade -inplace b2b -wait
• wait for it to complete then restart
• Review output
1. If account not correctly permissioned ProfileSynchronizationServiceInstance will fail to start and will need to be manually restarted.
12. Verify update by repeating step 1.

Steps to Start ProfileSynchronizationServiceInstance

1. Access Central Administration
2. System Settings > Services on Server
3. User Profile Synchronization Service > Start
1. Select User Profile Application: [User Profile Service]
2. Enter password for Service Account: [We save them in KeePass]
3. Click Okay

That is all there is.  Biggest thing is to remember to plan for downtime and alert your users when the system will be down.