Alexander’s Blog

Thanks to Microsoft, they have not raised their certification prices for a long time, until now. Effective July 1, 2011, the retail price of Microsoft Certifications will increase worldwide, except for India where the increase will be in effect on August 1, 2011.

Although some of the prices for Microsoft Certification exams for students and academic institutions will increase, according to Microsoft, the discount will remain significant. This is because Microsoft wants to help students become more employable for entry jobs in the IT industry. IT Academy members, high school, college, or university students enrolled in a degree or diploma program will continue to receive a discount off the retail price of select Microsoft Certification exams.

When you enable incoming e-mail on a SharePoint Server 2010, SharePoint sites can receive and store e-mail messages and attachments in Lists and Libraries. Here are the steps necessary to configure incoming e-mail for a SharePoint Server 2010 farm.

1. Logon to the SharePoint Server 2010 as an administrator.
2. You will require SMTP service installed on the server. If you haven’t, when you try to configure the incoming e-mail service you will be warned that the SMTP service is not running.
   NOTE: Incoming e-mail for SharePoint Server 2010 uses the SMTP service. You can use the SMTP service in one of two ways. You can install the SMTP service on one or more servers in the farm, or administrators can provide an e-mail drop folder for e-mail that is forwarded from the service on another server. If you are not using a drop folder for e-mail, the SMTP service must be installed on every front-end Web server in the farm that you want to configure for incoming e-mail.
3. In our example, we will configure the SMTP service so we don’t have to install SMTP on every Web Front End (WFE) server in the farm.
4. To configure the SMTP service open the Server Manager and go to the Features section. Add the SMTP feature. In most cases you can simply accept all the default options. To manage the SMTP service on Windows Server 2008 and Windows Server 2008 R2, you must use Internet Information Services (IIS) 6.0 Manager. Make sure you install the IIS 6 Management Tools when you install the SMTP service.
5. Because you can’t use IIS 7.o Manager to manage the SMTP server, go to the IIS 6.0 Manager console (available in the Administrator Tools) where you will see the SMTP virtual server.
6. Add your domain as an alias domain.
7. If the SMTP virtual server has not started, right-click the server and click Start. You can further configure the SMTP server if necessary.
8. Start the Services console (services.msc) and configure the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) service to start Automatically.
9. Ensure that you have an MX record for the zone in the DNS for your SMTP server. For example, go to the Forward Lookup zone in the DNS console and add a Mail Exchanger (MX) record that points to the IP address of your SMTP server, which in this case will be your SharePoint server.
10. Go to Central Administration -> System Settings -> Configure incoming e-mail settings under the E-mail and Text Messages (SMS) heading. These settings apply to the entire SharePoint farm.

    

11. Configure the settings for the entire farm as shown below. In the Automatic settings mode, you can select to receive e-mail that has been routed through a safe-e-mail server and in the Advanced settings mode you can instead specify a drop folder. We will use the Advanced settings mode.Enable sites on this server to receive e-mail?: Yes
    Settings Mode: Advanced

    

12. Configure E-mail drop folder as shown below.
    E-mail drop folder: c:\inetpub\mailroot\drop

    

13. After you configure incoming e-mail, users who have Manage Lists permissions can configure e-mail–enabled Lists and Document Libraries.
14. Once incoming e-mail has been configured, go to the List or Library’s Settings where you want to configure the incoming e-mail settings.
15. Under the Communication section you will notice a link for Incoming e-mail settings. Not all lists have this option. For example, the Calendar list has this option but you won’t find this option for a Tasks List.
16. The options to configure a List are different than the options to configure a Document Library. The options for a Calendar list are shown below.

    

17. For a Document Library the options look like this. You can configure these options as necessary. Here are my preferences.

    

18. At this point when someone sends an e-mail to the List or Library, the item is added to the respective List or Library automatically. If you are doing a test, be patient because it may take a minute or two for the document to show up in SharePoint. You can always go to the drop folder on the server and verify that the document is there and then wait until the timer job runs and the item is displayed in the destination List or Library.

If you want to configure more advance options, such as Directory Management Service, check out this article on the TechNet.

If you are getting an error from the source SharePoint Portal Server with Event ID 5553 on your SharePoint Serer 2010 you may need to delete the link in the Config_DB. The error may look similar to the following.

failure trying to synch site dd51ad6a-e14d-4ed7-a2a7-e22992f09990 for ContentDB 00f45cc7-4f4a-44e7-8779-854375da0a81 WebApp 549868d8-17ab-4c75-9193-d2e38e7f3517.  Exception message was Cannot insert duplicate key row in object ‘dbo.UserMemberships’ with unique index ‘CX_UserMemberships_RecordId_MemberGroupId_SID’.
The statement has been terminated..

One solution that I know is to use the STSADM tool to list the content databases that are out of sync and then delete the links. Here’s how.

1. Lists content databases that have not been synchronized since n days. The presumption is that they have been deleted or moved. For example, to list the databases that have not been synchronized for 1 day type the following command:
   stsadm -o sync -listolddatabases 1
2. To delete old records corresponding to these out of sync databases, use the deleteolddatabases command. Don’t worry, according to Microsoft, this command doesn’t delete the databases themselves it only deletes the links in the configuration databases.
   stsadm -o sync -deleteolddatabases 1
3. You should see an Operation completed successfully message.

In SharePoint 2010 you can enable the Developer Dashboard feature. If you are not sure how then check out my blog How to Enable the Developer Dashboard in SharePoint 2010. Besides giving you all the stats that look cool, the main purpose of the dashboard is to provide you additional performance and tracing information that can be used to debug and troubleshoot issues with page rendering time. If you are not a developer, you are probably saying “Ya, whatever!”, but if you are a developer you are most likely to really appreciate the dashboard.

Even if you are not a developer, I suggest you turn on this feature (by default it is turned off) because you never know when you might find it useful. If nothing else, you might appreciate the Asserts and Critical Events section of the Developer Dashboard.

Notice the red warning in that section that is telling me that there is an issue with the publishing cache that I need to look into. It even gives me the Event ID number so I can go my event logs and figure out what’s going on.

Here’s what my event log shows.

Today I was looking for the backslash key on my HTC EVO 4G and couldn’t find it. I had to do a little research as the location of the backslash key wasn’t very intuitive. Finally I found the key, along with another key that I have always wanted on my cell phone, the equal to sign.

If you never had a need to use either the equal to “=” or the backslash “\” key then you must be wondering why would I need these keys in the first place. Well, I need the backslash key to logon to certain Web sites that require me to use the Domain\Username convention (yes, I know I can use the Universal Naming Convention, or UNC, to logon to a Windows domain but I won’t go into all the details and reasons in this post). I have to use the equal to key in some URLs when I try to access certain Web pages.

Depending on your phone, you may not have the same options as I do, even if your phone uses an Android operating system. Here’s how you get to some of the “not too easy to find” keys on your HTC EVO 4G.

1. While in the Edit mode, click on 12# key in the lower right hand corner. The 12# and the ABC keys can be used to toggle between entering text and entering numbers. While in the ABC mode (shown below) touch the 12# key.

   

2. When you touch the 12# key it is replaced by the ABC key. The new screen has numbers 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, and 0 at the top and special characters on the next three rows.
3. On the left hand side just next to the keyboard icon you will notice a new key that is labeled 1/2. Apparently it means you are looking at page 1 of 2 pages. Touch that 1/2 key to switch to page 2/2 and you will find all kinds of cool characters, including the backslash and the equal to symbol.
4. The second page of the numbers screen includes the Euro, Yen, and Pound symbol. It also includes ~ = \ ^ [ ]< > { } | (this last one is the pipe symbol). In addition, it includes some other characters that don’t even exist on an average PC keyboard, such as inverted exclamation mark, inverted question mark, and a bunch of emoticons.

Again, just to remind you, this technique works on HTC EVO 4G mobile phones for sure but may not work on your model and make of Android phone.