My IT Experiences - Microsoft 365, SharePoint & Azure

PerformancePoint Service (PPS) is used to create content rich dashboards that aggregate data and content throwing light in to how business is performing. PPS was not part of MOSS 2007 but with SharePoint 2010 Microsoft has integrated PPS as a service within. Dashboard Designer is the tool using which we can author KPIs, Scorecards, reports, etc. Lets take a look at the steps involved in configuring PPS on a SharePoint 2010 Server farm. 1. Select Start -> All Programs -> Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Products -> SharePoint 2010 Central Administration. Click "Manage Service Applications" under Application Management. On the ribbon, Click on the Arrow below "New" and select "PerformancePoint Service Application". 2. Enter a name for this service application, select/create an application pool, and associate a managed account. 3. We get a confirmation screen on the service application successfully created. I had used the name "Performance_App" f...

I cleared the SharePoint 070-668 exam today, now I'm an MCITP in SharePoint 2010 :)

I'm not a fan of re-posting content but I'm doing it so that the possibility of somebody finding a solution for this error increases. I received the following error while trying to schedule a crawl on our SharePoint farm: I was able to start a full or incremental crawl and it would complete successfully and this led to the possibility of some issue with scheduling mechanism. Now SharePoint would leverage Windows tasks scheduler to schedule events from SharePoint and so it makes sense that this error disappears when we explicitly provide the local server group "WSS_WPG" read and write permission on the "Tasks" folder within Windows folder on the Index server. Here are the steps (Close all explorer windows before performing these steps): 1. Start - Run - type "Cmd" and execute the following command: attrib -s %windir%\tasks This is done so that the "Security" tab appears in the Tasks properties window. 2. Right click Windows\Tasks folder an...

I was trying out Excel 2010 for the first time and working with Excel services. I created an Excel workbook with OOB sales template and wanted to check the Excel service features offered by SharePoint 2010. While trying to publish the workbook to a document library from Excel - Save & Send - Save to SharePoint - Browse for a location - Save As I received an error which said “Path does not exist. Check the path and try again” I initially thought this would be an issue with the copy of Excel 2010 I had. But after doing some research it seemed the issue was related to the OS environment I was in because I could publish the same file from Windows 7 machine using similar Excel 2010 version. To get this working from Windows Server 2008 we need to enable a feature “Desktop Experience” from Server Manager Once I enabled this feature I could successfully publish the workbook.

SharePoint 2010 has some new features and components, which help to overcome difficulties such as redundancy and service-sharing that we faced while using SharePoint 2007.  Services in MOSS 2007 were implemented with the help of Shared Service Providers or SSPs. But we cannot use the services of one SSP for another SSP. So each SSP has to have its own set of services and applications, which increases redundant data in the farm.  For example, different managers in the same organization use a SharePoint site to maintain official data associated with an SSP. This SSP is associated with different services, such as Search service, BDC service, and a user profile service. A project manager in this organization requests an exclusive user profile service to maintain project data security. To provide this, we first need to create a separate SSP for the project manager and then a separate service called user profile service - project name. Next, we need to associate the SSP with ...

We have a SQL Server 2005 cluster with two nodes, one active and the other passive. We had to remove an 1 TB storage volume from the cluster and release it to the storage pool. Before removing any cluster resource we need to remove the dependencies. To remove this drive we have to remove the dependency of this drive from SQL Server service. Here are the steps: 1. Open cluster administrator 2. Right click SQL Service and select Properties 3. Click Modify and remove the resource from Modify Dependencies window 4. Now we can go back to Cluster Administrator and delete the resource/drive volume. If we delete the drive or resource without removing the dependency, the SQL Service might fail to start. The following errors might occur: TDSSNIClient initialization failed with error 0x103, status code 0x1. Could not start the network library because of an internal error in the network library. To determine the cause, review the errors immediately preceding this one in the error l...

I cleared the SharePoint 2010 configuration exam 70 - 667 the other day. I got 91% of the questions correct this time. There were some questions that were confusing but the test was not very difficult. I believe the set of questions around search and Powershell is what wrong for me. I plan to do 70 - 668 next!