As we all know, any new technology can be a pain to get right. With our solution and our deployment of our SharePoint farms we are running off Network Appliance hardware. We even had Microsoft certify that this is an accepted solution and gave it their blessing.

Our developers were having major troubles deploying their migration package to our Staging environment. They were getting very slow access time, and even timeouts, we're talking 10 minutes to upload one page. This put a major kink into our plans to deploy the new code and content to this environment. This started last week, so we put together a swat team to try and diagnose these issues.

Keys to the solution is diagnosing these issues:

SharePoint Itself
Active Directory
Firewalls
Network Connectivity
Sql
Network Appliance Hardware
Server Hardware (HP Blades)
Physical Drives & Spindles
Migration Tool (Uses SharePoint API's)
Server Trusts
A bunch of other small pieces of the pie.

As you can see from the above list there are many different items that we would need to check to verify there are no issues in that particular system.

The interesting thing is that as we go through the list everything checks out. So as I'm working with Microsoft we run PSSD and capture data from the Sql server to the NetApp.  NetApp ran another tool on their end. Come to find out we were getting massive reads but little to no writes. The network I/O was off the chart.

Come to find out the card on the Sql server was set to 1500mtu while the NetApp was running Jumbo 9000mtu. We re-cabled and switched our NIC cards on the SQL box to Jumbo.  Problem Solved.

It just comes to show that the smalled things can cause some of the biggest headaches.

I get a call from our marketing team that they are needing a redirect page on our public facing site. This redirect will send a user to a survey hosted outside of our environment. Our public site runs off MOSS (SharePoint 2007) and in looking at how to best redirect a user found this to be the easiest way to redirect them for us.

Open your site login with the required permissions in this case I'm logging in as the Farm Administrator.

Go to "Site Actions" then "Manage Content and Structure".

Create a new publishing site off the root of your site or where ever you want your redirect folder to sit. (Site >> New >> Site)
      This is the example I'm using
      Give it a title
      URL Name of the site
      Template Publishing >> Publishing Site
      Create Site

Go to your "Pages" folder. Create a new (Redirect Page) in this case I named it index.aspx.

Edit your redirect page and enter the URL where you are redirecting your traffic to.

Now a bit of a tricky part, you have to make sure you go into your "Site Settings" of that new site, navigate to "Look and Feel" and select "Welcome page" and change the default page listed by SharePoint to the page you have just created, in this case "index.aspx".

Now when a user visits the site http://www.yoursite.com/redirect/ it will automatically shoot them to the redirect URL you specified in the redirect page.

Enjoy!

Just started up with Emerson Electric today as the MOSS Technical Application Administrator.  I realize I have alot to learn here.  It is a gigantic corporation with many divisions and people.

Fixed my first real test. SharePoint Alert setup can be a major pain and today was the same.  The issue was after an alert was set, no outgoing emails were being sent.  There are countless posts and threads throughout the web but a couple were needed to fix this issue.

First of all, McAfee Antivirus, that special program, you have to make sure service applications can punch through port 25.  Once this is done you don't have to worry about port blocking.  Next, making sure the firewall itself allows the program to get out. Guess what.... after fixing the first 2 things.. more was needed.  Next I dove into SQL Server to fix table permissions for the content table, allowing the service account to properly access the tables. Last but not least, I had to go into Services and setup the Sharepoint Worker Process to use the proper access account.

So, through a couple hours of trial and error everything is successfully working and all users are receiving their email alerts and notifications.