Wictor Wilen

For a couple of weeks (ahem, months) I’ve been struggling with a strange Search Service Application issue. Some time back I went to check out on some Crawled Properties when making a tool to help copying settings between SSA’s (more on this tool in another post). Then I noticed that there were tons of Crawled Properties with just garbled binary data(!) as the property name.

Visual Studio 11 Developer Preview is now available for download für alles and it does not only include the Windows 8 stuff like the previous preview did - this one contains the thing we all want - the SharePoint Developer tools. Overall the performance of Visual Studio 11 is blazingly fast! I regret I tested it - since I will go back to 2010 tomorrow (or even tonight). They team has done a great job and included a lot of the PowerTools natively; such as the new Solution Explorer, the improved search feature etc.

It is always fun to get back on site after a couple of days off work. SharePoint 2010 is like an annoying little critter, if you’re not there to cuddle with it it will do the most strange things. I currently have a support case open regarding some issues with crawled properties (I hope that will be another story to tell another day) and went into the Search Service Application admin pages in Central Admin to check some things. When poking around I noticed that the incremental crawl hasn’t been run for a few days - actually it stopped working on the 31st of December last year (sounds like ages ago now :-). In this farm we have three Search Service Applications and only this one hadn’t been incrementally crawled - the other two worked just fine. I fired up an incremental crawl manually and that worked, waited for the next incremental crawl to start - and it didn’t. Also tried a full crawl manually - which worked fine, but the scheduled crawls never started.

It’s that time of the year, when you’re thinking about what you’ve done and accomplished the last twelve months. I’ve been writing a summary for the last five years (2006, 2007, 2008, 2009 and 2010) and I always think it’s fun to look back at the year gone and do some predictions for the upcoming one. This year has been totally crazy - I’ve been enjoying my work and clients/projects at Connecta and I totally love that we have such a strong team and offering. I can really feel the momentum we have in our team and projects, and nothing is stopping us now…

The last week I stumbled upon a really interesting new and shiny User Profile Synchronization issue - one of these things that just make your day! We had to manually initialize a full synchronization, after doing some updates to one of the user profile properties, and the user profile synchronization would not just start… Everything looked fine (on the surface) and we tried the incremental sync, which also looked like it was starting but nothing happened. The sync service was up and running and the FIM services was started, the MIISClient showed no activity. We took a look at the timer jobs, which are responsible for kicking of the synchronizations and saw that they all failed with the error message Access Denied.

It was some time since I did a real blog post and I have been fiddling with a specific topic, which I’m going to write about, for quite some time now. I’ve been working an Office 365 Intranet and been doing two conferences lately where I’ve demonstrated Office 365 and Windows Azure integration. One of the challenges (and boy, there are many) of Office 365 and SharePoint Online are access to External Data or services. In a few blog posts I will describe how you can work around these issues using some very simple techniques. All that is to it is that you have to “think outside the box” and not always go down the traditional SharePoint way of doing things.

Back home after a few days in Berlin for the European SharePoint Conference 2011. It was a great conference with good speakers and really nice attendees. It was three days full of sessions, expert panels, shoot-outs and SharePoint fun! Thanks to everyone who was there (especially those who came to my sessions :-) and the team behind the conference! And as always it great to meet up with the SharePoint MVP’s, MCM’s and now even MCA’s!

I’ve now been home for about 48 hours since visiting Anaheim, California, for this years edition of the Microsoft SharePoint Conference. It has been a great week in California with colleagues, friends, clients and new acquaintances. This year, eight people from my company, Connecta, travelled over for the conference. We all had a blast with some spare time before and after the conference, which included a visit to Six Flags - Magic Mountain and a drive along the Pacific coast. We also met up with a few old friends and colleagues and had a good time with our clients, who also attended the conference.

A couple of days ago the SharePoint 2010 Cumulative Update for August 2011 was released. Always a good time to see some things fixed and some things break. Installing a Cumulative Update is always a risky business, and you should only install them if you any experience problems that the CU resolves and only when you thoroughly tested it. One CU to rule them all! Without going into details about the content and fixes in the August 2011 CU there is one other thing that is of real interest - and that is how MIcrosoft has changed the packaging process for the Cumulative Updates. Since the release of SharePoint 2010 there has been talk and discussions about über-packages. That is Server Cumulative Packages that contains both the Server hotfixes as well as the Foundation hotfixes, which makes the update process a bit easier and faster - you only need to install one package. Up until now there has been mixed messages on the über-packages and caused some confusion. The recommendation has been that you need to install both SPF and SPS CU’s on a SPS installation and all three if you’re using Project Server.