When to use a Site Collection over a Sub-Site

When should you use site collections over sub-sites in your design?

Site collections really bring a considerable amount of flexibility and scalability to your design and I would recommend that you start from the perspective of multiple site collections and then see if you can find logical and compelling reasons to move away from them.

Here are some general guidelines that you should consider before you create a site collection or a sub site.

Consider the core purpose of the site structure you are contemplating. Consider it in relation to the other site structures your portal may house. It is generally not advisable to intermingle disparate sites in the same site collection. For instance you probably would not want your Internet presence site and your collaboration portal to all be part on the same site collection. There are simply too many moving parts that are completely unrelated to one another to make this feasible. While this is a simple example you could consider something such as separating out department sites or even project sites. I do this a lot simply because HR may need a different approach to security than Finance.

If distributed control is something that you want then multiple site collections would be the best way to go. Site collections really are the first layer where we can truly separate out security and administration. Although we can break security inheritance at the site level these still fall under a single umbrella or controlling entity, the site collection and its administrator. I see this a lot when it comes to those core department sites that any organization has. Many times Human Resources, Finance, IT, and Operations will be separated out into their own site collections to provide an additional layer of content control.

Boundaries are a consideration as well. Some of the key components that make up a SharePoint site are scoped to the site collection level. While there are ways around these boundaries they should be accounted for in your design. The following is a list details some of these components.

 

• Site Columns and Content Types
• Site Quotas
• SharePoint Security Groups
• Recycle Bin
• Site and List Templates and Master Pages
• Search Scope and Keywords
• Out-of-box Back up and Restore capabilities
• Separate Content Databases

If you have groups that cannot share resources they really need to be broken out into separate site collections. Governance can come into play here from the stand point that if the two groups should not have the ability to view or control one another’s content then they should be separate or a single, and separate, entity should administer the site collection.

Finally one of the biggest drivers for a separate site collection is security. The ability to place an entirely separate security structure around each site collection can be critical. Site collections can also be broken out into separate content databases which can offer an additional layer of security at the database.

My general feel on this is to begin my design with multiple site collections in mind and then see if I can find a valid reason to deviate from that design. Sometimes the reason is there but more often than not I find that site collections simply bring too much to the table.

Site Settings at Top Level Site or Site Collection:

http://sharepoint.domain.com/sites/IT

Site Settings at Sub Site:

http://sharepoint.domain.com/sites/IT/WindowsTeamSite
Or
http://sharepoint.domain.com/sites/IT/UnixTeamSite

Note: I have copied this post from Joe Shepherd’s blog. Thank you very much Joe for such a great post!

Other caveats of using MS Office 2003 with Microsoft SharePoint 2007 products

I have already discussed caveats of using MS Office 2003 with Microsoft Office SharePoint 2007 products in my last post. Before I talk about the other caveats, I would strongly recommend you to go through following white paper,

 

White paper: Good, better, best: Office and SharePoint Products and Technologies

 

Issues:

 

1. Unable to check out document from SharePoint document library for editing it in MS Office 2003.

Error – "Edit Document’ requires a Windows SharePoint Services-compatible application and Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.0 or greater."

 

2. Internet Explorer crashes (stops responding) when you try to open an Office document in a SharePoint document library.

 

Here is how you fix these issues,

 

There is no need to remove any Office 2007 applications from your computer.
 
Step 1: Repair Office 2003:

1. Go to Start => Control Panel
2. Double Click on "Add/Remove Programs"
3. After this list populates, locate and click "Microsoft Office 2003 Professional Edition"  or any other version of Microsoft Office 2003.
4. Click on the "Change" button
5. On the window that appears, click on the button "Reinstall or Repair" and select "Next"
6. Click on the radio button "Detect and Repair errors in my Office installation" then click "Install"
7. A message will appear once the repair is complete.
 
Step 2: Click this link to a hotfix file from Microsoft and select "Run" to install this hotfix:
http://download.microsoft.com/download/f/5/1/f511cec6-d8c5-444e-bd76-5161b2a16c9f/office-kb938888-fullfile-x86-glb.exe
 
Information about this hotfix can be found here:
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx/kb/938888

 

Additionally, you may refer to following KB article if above steps do not resolve your issue,

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/833714

 

Note: Above issues may occur with MS Office 2007 applications (Word, Excel, PowerPoint etc.) too. You need not to uninstall any MS Office 2007 applications in order to resolve them.

 

We do not have MS Office 2007 available yet so all above issues were reported while using MS Office 2003 with Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007.

Content types in Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 and MS Office 2003

Let’s talk about custom content type in Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 and how it works with MS office 2003. To help visualizing this, I have taken screen captures for every little step.

1. Create a custom content type for your test site. I am going to use “SCTest” top level site (site collection) for the demo. Go to Site Actions => Site Settings and click on “Site Content Types” link under Galleries category.

2. Click “Create” link on the top left corner of Site Content Type Gallery.

3. Create a new site content type as shown below. I have chosen Document content type for simplicity. You can add this content type to “Custom Content Types” by selecting it for Group category but I have created a new group called “Test Group” to add this new content type. Please note that I have named new custom content type as “Project Release Documents”

4. You will see following screen on adding a new custom content type. Click “Add from existing site columns” link under “Columns” category.

5. Add appropriate columns for this new content type. I have chosen few as shown below.

6. This is how a new custom content type looks like after adding few existing site columns.

7. I am creating a new document library for “Test Site Collection” (SCTest) to use this custom content type.

8. As usual, I have used shortest possible name for my document library to keep URL for this document library as short as possible. You can always change the “Name” field later on by going to Title, description and navigation under General Settings of document library settings.

9. Go to Settings => Document Library Settings.

10. This is an additional step. I have modified the document library name from TCTL (to keep URL short) to Test Content Type Library as by going to Title, description and navigation under General Settings

11. Click “Advanced Settings” link under General Settings category.

12. Select “Yes” for “Allow management of content types?” and click “OK”.

13. Select “Add from existing site content types” link under Content Types.

14. Select a new custom content type – “Project Release Documents” which you have created in previous steps as shown below.

15. This is an additional step – I am changing order for content types and making “Project Release Documents” as default content type. Select “Change new button order and default content type” link under Content Types.

16. Change the order and select number “1” for “Project Release Document” content type to make it default content type for this document library.

17. So finally content types and columns for your document library will look something like this. Please adjust your column order by clicking on default view – “All Documents”.

18. Now, something very interesting…how content types work with MS Office 2003. Well, keep reading…

As you can see from the screen capture, “Project Release Documents” is the default content type for your document library. Click New menu and select “Project Release Documents” to add a new document (content) to your document library.

19. You will see following message on your screen, if you have MS Office 2003 installed on your machine. Click “OK”

20. It will allow you to use MS Office 2003 (Word 2003) to create a new document. As you have already noticed MS Office 2003 will not allow you add/edit metadata in Word application itself. Add some text to this document and click “Save” icon.

21. Now, you can add those metadata properties for your document however I have noticed that couple of document properties is still missing…I don’t know why. I need to check it out later but anyways it will allow you to add metadata properties for your document using MS Office 2003 and that is what is more important.

22. To add those missing metadata properties, I am going to right click on document in my document library and select “Edit Properties” link.

23. Adding those missing metadata properties, which I could not see in MS Office 2003 for some reasons.

24. Finally here is the document in document library which was created using custom content type and MS Office 2003.

Now, here is the scenario for those unlucky people who can not work with content types using MS Office 2003.

Note: This site belongs to different SharePoint test environment than the previous one.

1. I have created ProjDocs document library and it has “Test Content Type” as default content type.

2. Attempt to create a new document in ProjDocs document library. Same message will pop up, which is shown is previous screen capture before opening MS Office 2003 (Word 2003) for creating a new document.

3. Unfortunately when you try to save this document, it will give you following error message. When you (keep) clicking on either “Yes” or “No” button, it will finally add this new document to ProjDocs but all metadata properties will be missing and you can not add metadata properties even by editing properties in SharePoint.

4. Document “Test2” was added.

5. Trying to edit metadata properties by right clicking “Test2” document in ProjDocs document library and selecting “Edit Properties” link.

6. Unfortunately it does NOT allow adding those missing metadata properties.

7. Here is the work around. If you want to create a new document, simply upload a new document and it will allow you to add those metadata properties but if you want to edit metadata properties of existing document unfortunately you have to download that document to your local computer first and then upload it back to edit/update its metadata properties. Here is the screen capture for uploading a new document to ProjDocs document library.

8. Enter metadata properties for this document and you are done!

9. Here is how ProjDocs document library looks like after uploading those two documents.

Note: Error: ‘length’ is null or not an object is environment specific. It happened in our environment after we installed one of the hot fixes (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/935958) for resolving the other issue.

Here is the hot fix for those who are unable to work with content types using MS Office 2003.

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;950292

This hot fix also resolves issues to work with multiple content types using MS Office 2003.

Note: I have taken screen captures from two separate SharePoint environments.

Step 1-24 are from the enviornment, that does NOT have http://support.microsoft.com/kb/935958 hot fix applied and we can work with content types using MS Office 2003 without any issues.

Step 1-9 are from the environment, that has http://support.microsoft.com/kb/935958 hot fix applied and for some reasons we are unable to work with content types using MS Office 2003 after applying that hot fix. We have to apply http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;950292 hot fix to resolve errors explained in these steps but we will have MS Office 2007 available very soon so we have NOT applied it yet.

How to make “All Sites” scope available to a top level site created using “Team Site” template?

One of my friends had an issue in making “All Sites” scope available to a top level site (site collection) created using “Team Site” template. So I thought of writing this blog. This post assumes that you have Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 implemented in your environment.

First of all, why “All Sites” scope is not available, when you create a top level site or site collection using “Team Site” template? Because team site template is designed for WSS site and WSS does not have enterprise search feature available by default. In other words you can search only within that site itself and cross site search will not be available. Cross site search or Enterprise search feature is available only for Portal Site templates. If you will create top level site using templates under “Publishing” category, you will have “All Sites” scope available.

So here is how you can make “All Sites” scope available to a top level site, which is created using “Team Site” template. For simplicity, I have taken screen capture for everything right from creating a new site collection (top level site) using “Team Site” template to making “All Sites” scope available to it.

1. Create a new site collection using “Team Site” template. We have created a new site collection called “SCTest”.

2. Only “This Site: Test Site Collection” (Name of the site collection) scope is available by default and we would like to have “All Sites” scope available at this top level site.

3. After you create top level site, create a new “Search Center” site for this top level site.

Note: If you have 50 site collections and all those site collections are created using “Team Site” template then I would suggest you to create 50 “Search Center” sites – one for each and with the same name (for naming conventions), if you want “All Sites” scope available to all those top level sites.

4. Here is “Search Center” site created for SCTest site collection.

5. Now, you need to change search settings for SCTest site collection. So go to Site Actions=> Site Settings and click “Search Settings” link under Site Collection Administration.

 6. Choose “Use custom scopes. Display richer results using the following Search Center:” and provide URL to “Search Center” site. In our case it is “/sites/SCTest/SearchCenter/”

7. Now, you can see “All Sites” scope is available to SCTest top level site.

 8. Additionally you may need to activate “Office SharePoint Server Publishing Infrastructure” by going to “Site Actions=>Site Settings” and clicking “Site Collection Features” link under Site Collection Administration category.

9. You may also need to activate “Office SharePoint Server Publishing” feature by going to “Site Actions=>Site Settings” and clicking “Site Features” link under Site Administration category.

 

That’s it! You are all set. You can start using “All Sites” scope for cross site search capabilities.

Unable to activate Office SharePoint Server Publishing Infrastructure from site collection features

 

Issue: Unable to activate "Office SharePoint Server Publishing Infrastructure" from site collection features.

We had "Office SharePoint Server Publishing Infrastructure" activated since beginning but for some reasons it was deactivated and when I tried to activate it, I received "Access denied" error.

Note: We have followed Microsoft Guidelines for setting up administrative and service accounts.

Solution:

1. Open IIS Admin.
2. Locate the Web Site for your MOSS web application.
3. Go to the properties and select "Home Directory" tab.
4. Make a note of Application Pool used for this web site.
5. Expand Application Pools in IIS.
6. Go to the properties of Application Pool, which you have noted in step 4 and select "Identity" tab.
7. Make a note of the account used under "Configurable".
8. Change the Application Pool identity to SharePoint Service Account – This is the same account, which you have used for installation of MOSS 2007.
9. IISRESET
10. Activate "Office SharePoint Server Publishing Infrastructure" from site collection features.
11. Change the Applciation Pool identity back to the original (same account which you have noted in step 7).
12. IISRESET.

Permission issues in SharePoint 2007

 

Issue: Unable to access Spell Checker in Rich Text Editor of Content Editor web part.

Your sub site has custom permissions (NOT inherited from parent site) and you have "Full Control" access to your sub site but you are unable to use Spell Checker in Rich Text Editor of Content Editor web part.

Solution: Create a custom permission level and name it "Reader Plus" (or any other appropriate name) by copying "Reader" permissions and adding "Browse Directories" permission at top level site. Allow "Reader Plus" access to the account at top level site, which has this issue.

Issue: Unable to access "Information management policy settings" from Document Library settings or List settings.

You have "Read" permissions at top level site and "Full Control" permissions to your sub site but you are unable to access "Information management policy settings" from Document Library settings or List settings.

Solution: Same As Above

Note: These permission issues seem to be addressed in Service Pack 1 for SharePoint 2007 however I haven’t got a chance to install Service Pack 1 in our SharePoint environment yet.

Crawl doesn’t work and Query server is not responding; Search works only for old (crawled) contents

We had this search issue in January’ 2008 and here is the description,

 

We have following three servers with MOSS 2007 STD deployed in SharePoint server farm,

 

App01– Query Server

App02 – Index Server (We are using this server as dedicated web front end computer for crawling)

SPDBServer – SQL 2005

 

Search was working fine till 01/05/2008 and it stopped working after this date only for new contents meaning search is still working fine for the old contents which were added before 01/05/2008 but not for new contents added after 01/05/2008.

 

We have been working to find out reasons why did that happen? We have found following event ids on Query server,

 

Event ID:10042 – A new query machine, ‘App01’, has been added to the query rotation based on changes to farm topology.

 

Event ID:27745 –  The following information is part of the event: #50071: Unable to connect to the database SharePoint_Config on SPDBServer.  Check the database connection information and make sure that the database server is running..

 

Event ID: 7888 – A runtime exception was detected. Details follow.

Message: A connection was successfully established with the server, but then an error occurred during the pre-login handshake. (provider: SSL Provider, error: 0 – Not enough memory is available to complete this request)

 

We had some database backup client issue on database server but after fixing that issue and rebooting all the three SharePoint servers, we noticed that crawl was not responding. Last incremental crawl, started on 01/05/2008 did not stop even on Monday (01/07/2008).

 

We have incremental crawl scheduled at every 6 hrs. everyday and full crawl scheduled on every saturday.

 

After coming back to work on Monday 01/07/2008, we tried search and noticed that it was working only for existing contents(added before 01/05/2008) and not for all the new contents, which were added after 01/05/2008.

 

When we check Search settings, it says "Query server not responding" and we are unable to stop/pause the incremental crawl, which was started on 01/05/2008. Only way to stop that crawl is to stop Office SharePoint Server Search service from services.msc on both App01 and App02 server.When we stop the crawl this way and start it again, it goes on and on and never stops. We have tried to start both full and incremental crawl this way but that didn’t help.

 

Only resolution to this issue, I have found is to readd App01 – Query server to the farm from SharePoint Central Administration however I am still wondering, if that will fix our "Query Server not responding" error. As per our research, it seems few other people also have noticed this issue for some unknown reasons and if SharePoint doesn’t have any operational errors, we can safely ignore them. Microsoft is aware of this isse and they are expecting to get this resolved in SharePoint 2007 Service Pack 1.

 

I was also thinking of resetting all crawled contents and rebuilding the content index. I  was affraid, if resetting the crawled contents will not regenerate/rebuild the new content index. If crawl will not work after resetting the crawled contents then SharePoint search will be completely down and it will stop working even for old contents.

 

Has anybody tried this KB?

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/925609

 

Can we move content index(search catalogs) from shared location to some other location on Query server and then try resetting crawled contents? Can we move content index back to its original location if resetting crawled contents will not generate a new content index or it will not propagate it to Query server?

 

If above KB article gives us the flexibility of reusing content index in case of resetting crawled contents fails to build a new content index or propagating it to Query server, we would like to try it first before we can try readding Query server to the SharePoint server farm (Stop and then restart Office SharePoint Server Search service for Query server from SharePoint Central Admin)

 

Does anybody know an appropriate solution to fix this issue? Search works only for old (Crawled) contents and not for new contents, Crawl never stops (hangs) and there is "Query server not reponding" message on search settings so basically it is not propagating the content index.

 

Solution:

 

Here is how we fixed this issue in our environment. This issue might be specific to our environment and this resolution may not work for similar issue in the other environment.

 

– We noticed few memory leaks in SQL Server 2005. We(our Windows Server team with SQL Administrator) fixed those issues first however fixing memory leaks in SQL didn’t help us to fix search issues in SharePoint and we still had "Query Server not responding" error in SharePoint and Search was not working.

 

– We created a new location for content index propagation on Frontend Server, which is also a Query Server.

Note: Do not move existing crawled contents from old propagation location to a new location manually. In fact, SharePoint does it automatically once you create a new location for content index propagation with the following command. It is strongly recommended that you start a "Full Crawl" after this to rebuild content index for updated contents.

 

– Ran following command to propagate search index to the new location,

 

stsadm.exe –o osearch –propagationlocation index file path

 

Please allow some time to move existing content index from previous location to a new location. You may see few known events in event viewer while SharePoint is moving content index to a new location however you can safely ingnore them. Please check status on Search Administration (SSP => Search Settings) page and for Query Server response. You can start a Full Crawl after few minutes once you see Query Server starts responding in Search Settings.

This has fixed our SharePoint search issue and it works fine now.

– Hope this will help others to resolve similar issue. Please make sure you do not have any SQL Server issues before you troubleshoot it in SharePoint.

 

References:

http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=925609
http://blogs.msdn.com/pdesai/archive/2007/09/27/moss-2007-search-scope-error-query-index-server-event-log-error-how-to-fix-it.aspx

Technet Post on this issue:

http://forums.microsoft.com/technet/ShowPost.aspx?postid=2706585&siteid=17

Incoming e-mail feature in SharePoint 2007

I am pretty excited about enabling incoming e-mail feature in our SharePoint production environment in this week ends finally. We have really tested it thoroughly in our SharePoint stage environment before enabling it in production envionment. In fact, we follow this process all the time to be on safe side 🙂

Alright, so we will talk about incoming e-mail feature and e-mail enabled lists and libraries in SharePoint 2007 today.

Before I start, let me tell you that we do NOT have MS Exchange server setup in our organization for e-mail routing but we have unix based mail routing system called – Majordomo. So it may differ from configuring incoming e-mail feature in MOSS 2007 with Microsoft recommended mail routing system- MS Exchange.

As you all know we can enable incoming e-mail in MOSS 2007 by going to Central Administration > Operations > Incoming E-Mail Settings. Here is how we have configured it,

1. Enable sites on this server to receive e-mail? Yes

2. Settings mode: Automatic

3. Use the SharePoint Directory Management Service to create distribution groups and contacts? Yes

Note: This setting is required ONLY if you want contacts to be created in your organization’s user directory allowing people to find e-mail enabled SharePoint lists in their address book. This service also provides support for the creation and management of e-mail distribution groups from SharePoint sites. If you don’t want contacts to be created in your organization’s user directory you can choose "No". Incoming e-mail feature will work regardless of what you select for this option.

If you have selected "Yes", you need to provide additional information. If you are not sure of this information, please contact the person who manages Active Directory and domain services for your organization. For example, we have

4. Active Directory container where new distribution groups and contacts will be created: OU=SPOU, OU=Organization, OU=ControlledObjects, DC=hq, DC=MyDomainName, DC=com

Note: I have changed few settings to keep the privacy.

5. SMTP mail server for incoming mail: MOSSServer1.hq.MyDomainName.com

6. Accept messages from authenticated users only? Yes (We have enabled incoming e-mail feature for intranet use only however we don’t want any spam e-mails in our system when we enable it for external accounts so it is always safe to select "Yes" option here.

7. Allow creation of distribution groups from SharePoint sites? Yes

8. Distribution group request approval settings: Create new distribution group and Delete distribution group are selected.

9. E-mail server display address: sharepoint.hq.MyDomainName.com

Note: This option is little tricky to provide a custom address here. Please note that the SMTP server name for incoming mail is "MOSSServer1" however we want contacts for e-mail enabled lists and libraries with suffix "@sharepoint.hq.MyDomainName.com". We can do this by adding another domain alias in IIS for SMTP Virtual Server. Here are the steps to add the domain alias for SMTP Virtual Server,

(i) Open IIS, where you have SMTP Virtual Server installed.
(ii) Expand Default SMTP Virtual Server.
(iii) Right click on Domains and select New => Domain.
(iv) Select Alias.
(v) Provide Name (Another Alias of this SMTP Virtual Server e.g. we have used sharepoint.hq.MyDomainName.com and click Finish button.

Note: MS Exchange or your mail distribution system (Majordomo in our case) must be configured to route all emails that suffix with @sharepoint.hq.MyDomainName.com to C:\Inetpub\mailroot\Drop folder of SMTP Virtual Server installed on MOSSServer1.

10. Safe E-Mail Servers: Accept mail from all e-mail servers is selected.

That’s it, incoming e-mail feature for MOSS 2007 is configured…Congratulations!

Now, Let’s talk about testing this feature…(Please keep in mind that we have Unix based Majordomo mail distribution system in our organization) Most of the time it worked fine for receiving e-mails in SharePoint however we stopped receiving e-mails after 2-3 days of testing. We were unable to telnet into server on port 25. SharePoint server(with Virutal SMTP Server installed) was not listening on port 25. We checked “Connection” property under “Access” tab of SMTP Virtual Server properties and noticed that SMTP server is accepting connection only from 196.X.X.123 server however we configured to receive e-mails from any e-mail server. So We removed that IP Address (196.X.X.123) from the “Computers” tab and set connection settings to “All except the list below” by keeping “Computers” tab empty. After this change, we started receiving e-mails in SharePoint as normal but question was how this change was occurred and who made changes to “Connection” settings? and here is the answer 🙂

While testing incoming e-mail feature in SharePoint, we set “Accept mails from these safe e-mail servers” with the above IP Address (196.X.X.123) and that changed “Connection” settings of SMTP Virtual Server in IIS. This was the root cause of this issue. So be very careful when you make any configuration changes to your incoming e-mail settings.

As I mentioned before I am pretty excited about announcing this feature in our SharePoint production enviornment however here are the few things what I am concerned about,

How can we manage undelivered emails?

1. What happens to emails, which are sent to wrong email addresses? SharePoint logs refer that as Unknown Alias. How does SMTP server handles it? Is there anyway we(or SharePoint Admin email account) can get notified for undelivered email messages? We tried to set email account in SMTP server properties for Undelivered emails but that didn’t help. We would like sender to receive bounce back email when email is sent to wrong email address or at least SharePoint administrator account get notified when email is not delivered to SharePoint.

2. We have Distribution List set for different groups. Let’s say for example, dl-spadmins has all email accounts of SharePoint administrators. If we add email address for SharePoint document library in this DL and then send email to dl-spadmins, all members of that DL receive email but SharePoint document library does NOT receive this email. Is there anyway to troubleshoot this issue?

Why we want to add email address for SharePoint document library to Distribution List (DL)? Because we can not find those contacts in SharePoint even though we have configured Directory Management Service for incoming email feature in SharePoint and that is because we have Majordomo mail distribution system instead of MS Exchange (I believe this is the reason, we can not find those contacts in MS Outlook but I am not sure) So if we add contacts for important SharePoint document libraries to DL of relevant department (Site Collection), anybody can send email to DL, which will send email/document to all the members of DL as well as SharePoint document library and nobody needs to remember email address of SharePoint document library. All they need to do is, just send an email to DL and it will reach both the members of DL and SharePoint document library, which these members are going to access later.

When you add email address of email enabled Document Library to Distribution List(DL), permissions for email must be set to "Accept e-mail messages from any sender" in order to receive email in SharePoint and yes, It shows "System Account" for those messages or the documents received in Document Library. This is already been discussed in this Blog and unfortunately we are still struggling for an appropriate solution. If you set "Save all attachments in folders grouped by e-mail sender" , it creates a new folder for each new sender and then add attachments to that folder however it still shows "System Account" under "Modified By" field but at least it gives you an idea (by looking at the folder name) who sent that email/documents to your Document Library.

If you set "Accept e-mail messages based on document library permissions" then the email will not be received in SharePoint.

One more thing…

If you set "Accept e-mail messages based on document library permissions" option for your Document Library and if somebody, who doesn’t have permissions on your Document Library sends an email to your Document Library, it never arrives in your Document Library. Also Sender will not receive any bounce back. So Sender assumes that he has successfully sent an email to your Document Library and you never receive it. Now, this issue might be specific to Majordomo(Unix based) email distribution system and may work well with MS Exchange configuration. I have tested this in my Lab with MS Exchange and I believe it sends the bounce back message if you don’t have permissions on the Document Library but I am not 100% sure. 😦

Finally here is the matrix for reusing same contact name for same library or different library in SharePoint,

References:
http://www.combined-knowledge.com/Downloads%202007.htm
http://www.toddklindt.com/blog/Lists/Posts/Post.aspx?ID=31

How to install Office 2003 web parts in MOSS 2007?

Back in September 2007, we upgraded SharePoint Portal Server 2003(SPS 2003) to Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 (MOSS 2007). For some unknown reasons, after finalizing upgrade to MOSS 2007, We have MOSS 2007 environment depending on configuration database of SPS 2003. We are unable to create a new site collection/site if we detach old SPS 2003 configuration database.

One of the best possible way to fix this issue is to reconfigure existing SharePoint 2007 environment and get rid of both old SPS 2003 configuration database and old MOSS 2007 configuration database, which was created as a part of migration to MOSS 2007. We can also think of creating a new web application (Portal Site) and move content databases from original web application to a new web application however we did not want to take any risk of inviting new issues without thoroughly testing it in our MOSS 2007 stage environment, which is almost identical to our MOSS 2007 production environment. I will talk about these two approaches for fixing old (SPS 2003) configuration database dependency issue some other day but my intension of mentioning this issue is to talk about how to make Office 2003 web parts and components to work if in case you upgrade or reconfigure your MOSS 2007 environment.

As I mentioned before, the best possible way to resolve SPS 2003 configuration database depedency issue in MOSS 2007 is to reconfigure MOSS 2007 and that is what we tried first in our MOSS 2007 stage environment. SharePoint stage environment was upgraded to MOSS 2007 the same way as production environment and stage environment also has SPS 2003 configuration database dependency issue. So we reconfigured SharePoint stage environment successfully (I will talk about it in detail some other day) and we noticed that we were unable to install Office 2003 web parts and components after this. We are still using MS Office 2003 company wide. So the only option, we were left with was to reinstall Office 2003 web parts without installing WSS 2.0/SPS 2003. We tried to install Office 2003 web parts and we received following error:

"You must install Windows SharePoint Services 2.0 before you install Office 2003 Web Parts and Components."

We found following KB Articles, which explain more about this error message and its work around.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/929320
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/927602
Here is the link for downloading Office 2003 Add-in for MOSS 2007,

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=38be67a5-2056-46a1-84b1-337ffb549c5c&displaylang=en

So if you upgrade SPS 2003 to MOSS 2007 or if you reconfigure existing MOSS 2007 environment and if you want to reinstall Office 2003 web parts (to use it with MS Office 2003, I know nobody would personally prefer it over MS Office 2007 but if your company is still using MS Office 2003 with MOSS 2007), you can download and install Office 2003 Add-in from above link, which will allow you to use Office 2003 web parts in MOSS 2007.

Thanks to Microsoft for releasing this Add-in on time otherwise we would require to start from the scratch, meaning refresh OS on the servers, install SPS 2003 and then upgrade it back to MOSS 2007 just to have Office 2003 web parts working in MOSS 2007.

Custom code to get the list of site collection administrators for all the site collections in SharePoint server farm

Alright
we have changed our idea of giving "Administrator" level access to all
the site collections to the outsourced team. Instead we decided to
deliver them an Excel document with the URL and site collection
administrators for each site collection. In fact, all the outsourced
team members have access to their own team site. So we are going to
upload this Excel document to their team site.

As usual, I wrote C# console application to achieve this.

Note:

1. This code assumes that you have all the site collections created under "sites/"
2. This is a console application so you have to use it the way you use stsadm command.
3. This code will output a text file with comma separated values when you run it as follows,

SCAdmin.exe -url http://sharepoint.domain.com > SCAdmins.txt

4. Finally you can import SCAdmin.txt file to an Excel document with ","(comma) selected as separator for creating a new column.

5. SCAdmin.txt file should look like this,

http://sharepoint.domain.com/sites/SC1, domain\spadmin;
http://sharepoint.domain.com/sites/SC1, domain\spadmin; domain\user2; domain\user3
http://sharepoint.domain.com/sites/SC1, domain\user4; domain\user5;
http://sharepoint.domain.com/sites/SC1, domain\spadmin; domain\user6
http://sharepoint.domain.com/sites/SC1, domain\user7;
………………………….
……………….
……..

6.
When you import SCAdmin.txt to an Excel document by selecting ","
(comma) as the separator, it will place URL in first column and site
collection administrators in second column.

Disclaimer: Please test this code in test environment before you use it. I will not be responsible the outcome of this code.

Here is the code,

using System;
using System.Collections;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Text;
using Microsoft.SharePoint;
using Microsoft.SharePoint.Administration;
using Microsoft.SharePoint.StsAdmin;

namespace SCAdmins
{
    class SCAdminsClass
    {
        static void Main(string[] args)
        {
            SCAdminsClass sc = new SCAdminsClass();
            sc.getSiteCollectionAdministrators(args);
        }

        private void getSiteCollectionAdministrators(string[] args)
        {
            try
            {
                string mode = "";
                string virtualserver = "";

                // get command line arguments
                if ((args.Length == 0) || (args.Length == 1 && (args[0] == "-?" || args[0] == "-help")))
                {
                    displayOutput("", mode);
                    displayOutput("SCAdmin.exe -url VirtualServerURL [-quiet]", mode);
                    displayOutput("", mode);
                    displayOutput("  -url VirtualServerURL: Full URL of virtual server starting with http://", mode);
                    return;
                }

                // loop through command line arguments
                for (int i = 0; i < args.Length; i++)
                {
                    if (args[i] == "-url")
                    {
                        virtualserver = args[i + 1];
                        i++;
                        // make sure url parameter starts with http:
                        if (!virtualserver.StartsWith("http:"))
                        {
                            throw new ArgumentOutOfRangeException("url parameter should start with http://&quot;);
                        }
                    }
                    else if (args[i] == "-quiet")
                    {
                        mode = "quiet";
                        continue;
                    }
                    else
                    {
                        displayOutput(String.Format("Unrecognized switch {0}", args[i]), mode);
                        return;
                    }
                }

                // connect to web application on virtualserver
                SPWebApplication webApp = SPWebApplication.Lookup(new Uri(virtualserver));
                // create site collections object for web application
                SPSiteCollection siteCollections = webApp.Sites;

                string SCUrl = "";
                int SCCount = 0;
                SPSite site = null;
                SPWeb web = null;
                string admins = "";
                // loop through site collections
                foreach (SPSite siteCollection in siteCollections)
                {
                    site = new SPSite(siteCollection.Url);
                    web = site.OpenWeb();
                    SCUrl = siteCollection.Url;
                    if (SCUrl.Contains("sites"))
                    {
                        SCCount++;
                        SPUserCollection users = web.Users;
                        foreach (SPUser user in users)
                        {
                            if (user.IsSiteAdmin)
                            {
                                admins = admins+user.LoginName+"; ";
                            }
                        }
                        Console.WriteLine(SCUrl + ", " + admins);
                    }
                    admins = "";
                }
                //Console.WriteLine("Total Site Collection: " + SCCount);
            }
            catch (Exception e)
            {
                Console.WriteLine(e.Message);
            }
        }

        private void displayOutput(string text, string mode)
        {
            if (mode != "quiet")
            {
                Console.WriteLine(text);
            }
        }
    }
}

Please send me an email if you need a zip file for this C# project. Enjoy!