SharePoint 2007 can be less than pleasant to fix if there are problems, and as I found out recently.. the quality of your backups can never be underestimated.

The Central Admin panel offers a good solution for backing up your farm, and can be accessed from the operations tab. There are hundreds of websites discussing backup strategies for MOSS and although that is not what this blog is about, they basically boil down to take a full backup of your farm using SharePoint but also databases via SQL Management Studio.

Where built in functionality falls short however, is the ability to automate regular backups. This, for me, is a huge stumbling block as backing up anything manually each day is never fun...

STSADM to the rescue..

Well, sort of. The command line tool STSADM can be used to kick off a full farm or single site collection backup easily enough, with no need to launch a web browser and manually start it. The syntax is shown below:

Using the following scarily entitled “catastrophic backup” option with the –backupmethod full flag, the entire farm can be packaged up nicely using a single command, to a location of your choice (provided the executor has farm wide admin status).

stsadm -o backup -directory "\\server\path\" -backupmethod full

Automation

With half the battle done, we now need to automate it. I created a relatively simple VBScript to manage daily runs of the backup process which creates a backup folder for the day run before email a completion or failure notification. You can download it below:

Feel free to modify it as you see fit, perhaps you could log the results to the error log of the machine, or implement some better error checking?

The only further step required is to schedule the process, and using Windows Task Scheduler on the machine where SharePoint is installed this is very straight forward. Ensure you set it to run as your SharePoint administration account

Of course, backups are completely useless unless they actually work, so always remember to test restoring from them at regular intervals :)

I don't understand why this was ever removed from the default SQL installation, but because I don’t think enough people know about this little tool, I'm going to blog about it.

I’ve been using SQL 2005 Service Manager (also 2008) for a while now, and it makes managing your SQL services easy just like you could way back when, in SQL 2000.

Clicking in once place rather then through the start menu to the service console then searching for the right service is far more efficient, and from the screenshot the application is pretty self explanatory. You select the instance you wish to manage, and then the service you want to control, then using the big buttons start and stop your services. Nice & simple.

It supports all SQL2000/2005/2008 editions and only requires .NET Framework 2.0 to run…

Download here: http://www.sqldbatips.com/showarticle.asp?ID=46

If (like me) you are a bit anal about naming conventions, and like to have all your databases/solution files/mp3s neatly organised. You won’t like the default installation of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007 at all, see below:

Even if you can put up with a randomised Global Unique Id (Guid) appended to your database name, the chances are your DBA will not.

In any case, it does look fugly, so how do you fix it? Easy...

In simple terms all you have to do is back up the database, restore it as the name of your choice, detach the old one and reattach the new one.

In real terms, as anyone who has ever worked with SharePoint will likely tell you its not really that straight forward, so here are some simplified steps.

1. Take a good backup of your farm, I cannot stress this enough. Make sure it works.
2. Log on the the front end web server as your SharePoint farm administration account
3. Stop the application pool named “SharePoint Central Administration v3” in IIS
4. Log on to the back end database server (if different) as your SharePoint farm administration account
5. Backup your “SharePoint_AdminContent_<Guid>” database in SQL Management Studio in the normal way
6. Immediately restore the database with a new name. I.e. “SharePoint_AdminContent”
7. Log off the back end server
8. On the front end server, open a command prompt and enter the following: cd %commonprogramfiles%\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\12\BIN
9. Then, using the STSADM tool to manipulate your database execute the following: stsadm -o deletecontentdb -url <http://webserver:port> -databasename SharePoint_AdminContent_<Guid> –databaseserver <DBSERVER1>
10. Followed by: -o addcontentdb  -url <http://webserver:port> -databasename SharePoint_AdminContent -databaseserver <DBSEREVER1>
11. Finally restart the “SharePoint Central Administration v3” application pool, and check central admin works.

At this point it would be prudent to test everything is working correctly, and then you can go ahead and delete the old database.

STSADM is a very powerful tool, so please use with caution.

Yesterday I tried to upgrade Acrobat Reader from v8.x to the most recent version but had a problem that I believe are likely caused by group policy deployment.

In short, the upgrade process cannot uninstall the older version correctly, due to requiring a network resource, and subsequently fails. For the same reason it cannot be done manually either. I was receiving a rather cryptic error message along the lines of "Internal Error 2753" which isn't very helpful. The resultant was no acrobat reader at all..

To tidy up the installation, you need to remove two registry keys located in HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Installer\Features\ & HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Installer\Products\

To find the exact keys to remove, scroll through the Products directory and look for 'Adobe Reader' in the product name string, it should be something like 68AB67CA7DA73301B7448Axxxxxxxxxx or similar (the key will be the same in each directory, delete them both)

If this fails to work, then you could try using the Windows Installer CleanUp Utility the only reason I didn't use this is because I don't like to install anything I really don't really need to.

Please note, this will not actually uninstall the application just make it look as if it has been removed by removing the entries from the registry. You should manually tidy up the file system yourself if you so wish!

Finally, reinstall Acrobat Reader by navigating to http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/readstep2.html with a browser that isn't Internet Explorer (to avoid the ActiveX web installer) and download the executable.