Alexander’s Blog

Renaming anything in a Microsoft’s environment is a risky business. Whether you are thinking about renaming a Domain Controller, an Active Directory domain (you better get your resume updated first), Exchange Server 2007 (ouch!), or a Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007, you know it could potentially turn into a nightmare. Of course, a lot depends on your environment and the size and complexity of your network.

I haven’t had the pleasure to actually rename a MOSS 2007 server in a production environment, but I ran into this blog by Mirjam van Olst. She explains the step-by-step procedure, in case you ever have a need to rename a MOSS server, so I thought I’ll share this with you.

Renaming a MOSS server is meticulous job. If anything goes wrong along the way chances are that you need to reconfigure your whole MOSS environment.

Here are the steps to take, and the order in which to take them if you want to rename a server that has MOSS already installed and configured on it:

*** NOTE: Use only letters, digits and minus for the machine name (so no underscores), max 15 characters.

* Change each alternate access mapping for your MOSS/WSS deployment in Central Administration:
- Open Central Administration, “Operations” Tab, “Alternate access mappings” link
- Modify each mapping item to reflect your newly chosen server name

* Use stsadm.exe to invoke the “renameserver” command option:
- Open a command prompt window
- cd “C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\12\BIN”
- stsadm -o renameserver -newservername <newname> -oldservername <oldname>

* Rename your Server via Change Name Operation in Windows Server 2003:
- Start Menu | Control Panel | System, “Computer Name” tab, “Change” button.
- Input your new server name

* Reboot the server NOW.

* After reboot, open command prompt
- cd C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\12\BIN
- stsadm -o updatefarmcredentials -userlogin <domainuser> -password <password>
- iisreset /noforce

* Check all application pool identities in IIS, update where the old machine name is still there.

* If you already have a search index drop this, and rebuild it

Your server is now renamed.

My niece became a Microsoft Certified Professional (MCP) in the final year of her high school and just before she started college……I thought that was impressive (well, compared to me anyway). Then I read about the 9-year old Pakistani girl that passed her MCP exam at half her age. Her story appeared in the Micronews. Now an 8-year old girl from India has become the youngest MCP ever. What I want to know is what’s next. Who’s going to break her record? A 5 year old? Before you know we will have 7 year old surgeons. OK, that’s not a joke. That’s something that has already happened (see list of childhood prodigies below).

According to news stories, M. Lavinashree passed her exam with flying colors. The kid has a photographic memory so apparently she didn’t have much trouble passing her exam. Now she is going for her MCSE.

Her accomplishments are posted on this Web site. There are lots of stories out there about her in the blogs, local media and magazines.

Speaking of child prodigies, you might be interested in this list of child prodigies.

When you add a SharePoint Library or List to Microsoft Outlook 2007 you will notice it uses SharePoint Drafts folder (in your default documents folder) on your computer. You may want to change the location for convenience, or you may be interested in backing up the files in the drafts folder that is used by various Office applications. There are at least three different methods that I know to change the location of the drafts folder.

Method 1

You can change the location of the SharePoint Drafts folder while working offline in Outlook 2007 by using the Edit Offline option. For details please see my blog post Adding SharePoint Libraries and Lists to Outlook 2007.

Method 2

The location of SharePoint Drafts folder can also be changed in Outlook 2007 as described below.

1. Start Outlook 2007 and go to Tools, Options.

2. Click on the Other tab.

3. Under the General section click on the Advanced Options button.

4. Click Service Options button at the bottom.

5. Click Offline Editing Options.

6. Change the location in the Server drafts location box.

Method 3

Because Outlook 2007 is part of Office 2007, you can edit this location from other Office 2007 applications, e.g. Word 2007.

1. Open Word 2007.

2. Click the Office button in the top left hand corner and then click Word Options.

3. Click Save (fourth item from top in the list).

4. Change the location as shown below.

For other Office 2007 applications you can go to the same location. For example, click on Office button and then go to Excel Options, PowerPoint Options, etc.

In Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007, by default users can only create one type of document in a Document Library. In other words, when users create a new document, it can only be from the default template that you selected at the time you created the Document Library. For example, if you selected Word 2007 (that uses template.doc file), then users can only create Word 2007 documents in the library when they click the New button. They do not have the option to “create” new Excel or PowerPoint documents. They can upload different types of document to the library but uploading a document is not the same as creating it from scratch based on a template. You can, however, add additional templates so users have the option to create additional types of documents (Excel, PowerPoint, Access, etc.) using the Content Types feature in MOSS 2007. In this article I will show you how to accomplish this task.

What are Content Types?

A Content Type is a group of reusable settings that describe the shared behaviors for a specific type of content. In MOSS 2007, Content Types can be defined for any item type, such as documents, list items, and folders. Content Types in Windows SharePoint Services (WSS) 3.0 and MOSS 2007 allow you to define and manage the metadata of your documents so you can effectively organize your data in a centralized location. Content Types are pretty impressive in SharePoint and learning how to use them is something that every Site owner or SharePoint administrator will find beneficial.

Step-By-Step Procedure for Creating Custom Menu Items

In this article I will show you how you can customize the menu in a document library to have Word, Excel and other applications added to the menu by using Content Types, as shown below.

1. Open Excel 2007.

2. Click Office button and then click Save As, Excel Workbook.

3. In the Save as type drop-down button select Excel Template (*.xltx).

4. Name the file something like ExcelTemplate.xltx.

5. Close Excel.

6. Go to your SharePoint site.

7. Go to Site Actions, Site Settings, Modify All Site Settings.

8. In the Gallery section click Site content types.

9. In the Site Content Type Gallery page click Create.

10. Enter a name for the Content Type. In our example, I will call it Excel Document.

11. In the Description type Create a new Excel document. Fill out the rest of the options as shown below. Notice that the default existing group is Custom Content Type.

NOTE: I usually prefer to use a different name that is easily identifiable, rather than using the default group. For example, I would select the New group option and then create a group called SeattlePro, or Intranet Site Collection so when I am searching through the Site Content Type Gallery I can locate my own Content Types easily.

12. You will be returned to the Site Content Type: Excel Document page.

13. There is one more thing we need to take care of before we are ready to add the Content Type to the document library. Go to the Document Library where you want to add the Content Type.

14. Go to Settings, Document Library Settings.

15. Click Advanced settings.

16. Check the option to Allow management of content types. Accept the defaults for all the other options and then click OK.

17. You will be taken back to the customize page. Notice a new section for Content Types. Allowing management of content types is necessary if you want to be able to manage the content types and add items to the menu as described in this article.

18. Now that we are done creating the Content Type, we will add the Content Type to the Document Library. In the Content Types section click Add from existing content types.

19. From the drop-down button select Custom Content Types.

20. In the Available Site Content Types box, double-click Excel Document to add it to the Content types to add section in the right-hand side box as shown below.

21. Click OK.

22. Now you should have two Content Types listed. One is the default called Document. This opens a Word document. The second called Excel Document that we’ve just created. Double-click the Excel Document link.

23. Click Advanced settings.

24. On the List Content Type Advanced Settings: Excel Document page notice that the URL for the template is pointing to a Word template, called template.doc. Click Upload a new document template and then click Browse.

25. The templates are saved by default in the location C:\Users\%username%\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Templates. If you saved your Excel template in a different location, upload it from there.

26. That’s it. You are done.

27. Go to your Documents Library and you will notice a new item added to the New drop-down box, as shown below.

28. In case you are wondering why the screenshot says Word Document instead of Word, that’s because I went into the Name and description option for the default Document content type and changed it from Document to Word Document. I also modified the description so it says Create a new Word document.

29. Now that you know how to add a template for Excel, use the same procedure to add templates for PowerPoint and other applications. Keep in mind that the Content Type you created can be reused in other Document Libraries. All you have to do is make sure that you do step 14-16 to allow management of content types for each Document Library that you want to add menu items. Then simply follow the steps for adding from existing Content Types to that library.

Conclusion

Content Types are a useful feature in SharePoint and hopefully now you will put it to good use. In this article I showed you how to add the templates to the menu for creating new documents in a Document Library. Of course, you can create custom templates that accomplish certain tasks for the users. For example, you could create an invoice template based on an Excel spreadsheet or a Word document, a PowerPoint template that is used by employees to create presentations for customers, a Word template to send out company faxes, a custom template for writing reports, the possibilities are endless. You can also attach workflows to the templates, apply information management policies, and even define custom columns associated with the content (metadata), as explained in Sharee’s article listed below.

Additional Resources

- If you are worried that the users won’t be able to quickly locate the new templates from the drop-down menu then you can install this cool Web part Content Type Toolbar for SharePoint.

- This article by Sharee English (available in HTML and PDF format) that explains how you can perform additional tasks of adding columns and workflows to Content Types. For those of us who are MCTs, this is a great practical example to show to our students in the classroom.

- This is a PDF poster from Microsoft about Using Content Types in WSS 3.0 and SharePoint Server 2007.

- This is another PDF poster from Microsoft called The WSS Content Type Object Model that developers will find useful.

There’s is a known problem experienced by many Vista users where the Help and Support stops working. When you try to start Help and Support you get the following error.

Internet Explorer cannot download / from help.

Internet Explorer was not able to open this Internet site. The requested site is either unavailable or cannot be found. Please try again later.

The error message is completely useless and gives you no indication as to what the problem might be. Instead it tells you to try later, hoping something will magically fix your problem. This may be very confusing for users who are not even connected to the Internet and are being informed that Internet Explorer was unable to open the Internet site, as if they were trying to browse the Internet.

You can reboot and reinstall Office and try just about everything else……chances are that nothing will help. The problem has to do with the registry setting for .xml file types. This often happens when there’s something wrong with the Content Type and luckily there are a couple of things you can try to fix the problem.

Solution 1

Try to register msxml3.dll by using the regsvr32 command by typing the following at the Start, Run:

regsvr32 msxml3.dll

Note: You will need administrative privileges to run the above command.

If this method doesn’t work and you have Dreamweaver installed then try this second solution. Most users with Dreamweaver have reported this problem. I also run Dreamweaver on my computer and was able to fix my Vista Ultimate by using this second method.

Solution 2

Copy the following text into Notepad and save the file as a text file with .reg extension (e.g. fixhelp.reg). Make sure that the file has .reg, and not .txt, extension.

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\.xml]
@=”xmlfile”
“Content Type”=”text/xml”
“PerceivedType”=”text”

Right-click the fixhelp.reg file (or whatever you named it) in Windows Explorer and select Merge.

You should now be able to open Help and Support normally.