During the past week, my colleague and I were doing some work for a client in NYC.  We were testing a different aspects of a MOSS implementation using their "standard" workstation build (as opposed to our laptops).  While doing that, we ran into a few errors by following these steps:

• Open up an MS word document via windows explorer (which uses WebDAV).
• Make a change.
• Save it.

We came to realize that some times (usually the first time) we saved the document, the save didn’t "stick."  Save did not save.  We would pull that document back up and our changes simply were not there. 

We didn’t understand the root issue at this point, but we figured that we should make sure that the latest MS Office service pack had been installed on that work station.  The IT folks went and did that.  We went through the test again and we discovered a new problem.  When we saved it, we now got this error:

This time, it seemed like every change was, in fact, saved, whether we answered Yes or No to the scripts question. 

We finally had a look at the actual version of Office and it turns out that the workstation was running MS Office 2000 with service pack 3 which shows up under Help -> About as "Office 2002".

The moral of the story: I will always use Office 2003 as my minimum baseline office version when using WebDAV and MOSS.

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(For search engine purposes, this is the error’s text):

Line: 11807

Char: 2

Error: Object doesn’t support this property or method

Code; 0

URL: http://sharepoint01/DocumentReview/_vti_bin/owssvr.dll?location=Documents/1210/testworddocument.doc&dialogview=SaveForm

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In one or my very first blog posts, I described the overall process we followed to migrate a customer from SPS 2003 to MOSS.  A reader left a comment asking for more detail and here it is.

For that migration project, we had to find a good way to move a lot of SPS 2003 documents over to MOSS.  The initial load was easy enough.  Create a new target document library in MOSS and use windows explorer to move the documents.

This is the new document library:

Open up two windows explorers.  Point the first at SPS 2003 and the second at the new document library in MOSS.  The following screen shot shows this.  Note that the top browser is actually pointing at my c:\temp drive, but you can imagine it pointing to an SPS 2003 document library:

After that drag and drop operation, my target looks like this:

Now it’s time to deal with the metadata.  Assume we have just one column of metadata for these documents named "location."  We can see from the above "all documents" view that the location is blank.  It’s easy enough to use a data sheet view to enter the location, or even go into each document’s properties one by one to add a location.  Let’s assume that there is no practical way to assign the location column a value automatically and that end users must do this by hand.  Furthermore, let’s assume there are hundreds of documents (maybe thousands) and that it will take many many days to update the metadata.  As we all know, no one is going to sit down and work for four of five days straight updating meta data for documents.  Instead, they will break that out over a period of weeks or possibly longer.  To facilitate this process, we can create an "untagged data" view as shown:

Now, when someone sits down to spend their allocated daily hour or two to tag migrated documents, they can use the "untagged documents" view to focus their effort:

As users tag documents, they drop off this list.

This notion of an untagged data view can also help with a class of data validation problem people inquire about on the forums.  Out of the box, there’s no way to prevent a user from uploading a document to MOSS and then not enter meta data.  We can specify that a particular site column is mandatory and the user won’t be allowed to push the save button.  However, if the user uploads and then closes the browser (or uses windows explorer to upload the document), we can’t force the user to enter meta data (again, out of the box).

This approach can be used to help with that situation.  We can use a "poorly tagged data" view to easily identify these documents and correct them.  Couple this with a KPI and you have good visibility to the data with drill-down to manage these exceptional circumstances.

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This week, I’ve struggled a bit with my team to get MOSS installed in a simple two-server farm.  Having gone through it, I have a greater appreciation for the kinds of problems people report on the MSDN forums and elsewhere.

The final farm configuration:

• SQL/Index/Intranet WFE inside the firewall.
• WFE in the DMZ.
• Some kind of firewall between the DMZ and the internal server.

Before we started the project, we let the client know which ports needed to be open.  During the give and take, back and forth over that, we never explicitly said two important things:

1. SSL means you need a certificate.
2. The DMZ server must be part of a domain. 

Day one, we showed up to install MOSS and learned that the domain accounts for database and MOSS hadn’t been created.  To move things along, we went ahead and installed everything with a local account on the intranet server. 

At this point, we discovered the confusion over the SSL certificate and, sadly, decided to have our infrastructure guy come back later that week to continue installing the DMZ server.   In the mean time, we solution architects moved ahead with the business stuff.

A weekend goes by and the client obtains the certificate.

Our infrastructure guy shows up and discovers that the DMZ server is not joined to any domain (either a perimeter domain with limited trust or the intranet domain).  We wasted nearly a 1/2 day on that.  If we hadn’t let the missing SSL certificate bog us down, we would have discovered this earlier.  Oh well….

Another day passes and the various security committees, interested parties and (not so) innocent bystanders all agree that it’s OK to join the DMZ server with the intranet domain (this is a POC, after all, not a production solution).

Infrastructure guy comes in to wrap things up.  This time we successfully pass through the the modern-day gauntlet affectionately known as the "SharePoint Configuration Wizard."  We have a peek in central administration and … yee haw! … DMZ server is listed in the farm.  We look a little closer and realize we broke open the Champaign a mite bit early.  WSS services is stuck in a "starting" status. 

Long story short, it turns out that we forgot to change the identity of the service account via central administration from the original local account to the new domain account.  We did that, re-ran the configuration wizard and voila!  We were in business.

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Although it’s not literally true, as a practical matter, an internet-facing web front end in a DMZ must be in a domain (i.e. not some standalone server in its own little workgroup).  It doesn’t need to be in the same domain as the internal WFE(s) and other servers (and probably shouldn’t), but it needs to be a domain.

My colleagues and I spent an inordinate amount of time on a proposal which included SharePoint pre-requisites.  This included a comprehensive list of firewall configurations that would enable the DMZ server to join the farm and so forth.  Sadly, we failed to add a sentence somewhere that said, to the effect, "the whole bloody point of this configuration is to allow your DMZ WFE server, in a domain, to join the internal farm."

A perfect storm of events, where we basically looked left when we might have looked right, conspired to hide this problem from us until fairly late in the process, thus preventing me from invoking my "tell bad news early" rule.

Sigh.

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