Why it could go wrong

The problem with the Sharepoint site, explained in the previous post, has a few point which I’d like to clarify.

Not because I hate looking like an idiot, but more for people to prevent the same situation happening.

The server we were running the intranet site from, was an unsupported server in our development environment.

I hope it is clear this is not my ideal setup. However, The company I work for is big. Too big, and when decisions are made, they are

A) Not alway’s made by the right people having the right understanding

B) Not always made in a timely manner, as most proposals/changes need to pass many approvers

The server was basically on the wrong environment due to a mix of the above.

Last year, as described in some posts, I started pushing for the intranet server. This was first received without any enthusiasm.

“The Chain” back then, saw it more as something that “would keep the boy’s distracted” and thus not worth paying for.

Why they had this view… I dont know, I only know my previous manager, and how much he “loved” keeping us busy.

It did , and against all expectations, the site was live quickly and everyone started using it.

We raised a couple of times the issue of the environment of the server but in the meantime “The Chain” started liking the possibilities of the intranet, and overloaded us with work. Custom lists, asp.net projects, workflows, etc.

This is where I was wrong. I believe that the only way I could have  prevented this is not accepting the work, until the server was hosted on a “safe” supported environment.

International Backup Awareness Day – B

The Intranet, a project I have been working on for that last 4/5 months has died.

The title from this article is highly inspired by the post on codinghorror last Monday:

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001315.html

This is what happened in my case:

• The server (still) ran on an unsupported development environment.
• Therefore, the server was not part of the company nightly backup’s
• I created a script that (using the STSADM.exe -o Backup) that ran every evening to make a backup
• However, 8 Updates were pushed on the night from Wednesday to Thursday.
  • - Security Update for Windows Server 2003 (KB974318)
  • - Windows Malicious Software Removal Tool – December 2009 (KB890830)
  • - Security Update for Windows Server 2003 (KB973904)
  • - Update for Windows Server 2003 (KB971737)
  • - Update for Windows Server 2003 (KB973917)
  • - Cumulative Security Update for Internet Explorer 7 for Windows Server 2003 (KB976325)
  • - Security Update for Windows Server 2003 (KB974392)
  • - Update for Windows Server 2003 (KB955759)
• This caused the server to reboot, while backing up.
• One of the updates was KB973917.
• When the server came back up, the intranet site was unreachable.

I started looking into this immediately. Even though the Intranet was launched only 2 months ago, it became an important part of our tool suite directly. The pressure to restore service was very high, and I was worried about loosing any data.

The steps I took where the following:

• Checked the Event logs, these where completely red. Different errors appeared, most of them referring to the application pools not able to start.
• Uninstall the updates installed the night before.
• I checked the event log again and found that most of the errors still existed.

Since I started troubleshooting this last Thursday, I am not sure what further steps I took, I do know that the following where included, but with no success:

• Checked access rights on component services (some errored out) and added the Network Service account (used to run the application pools) with local rights
• Re-ran the SP2 install for windows server 2003
• Re-ran Sharepoint Products and Technologies Configuration Wizard

This gave me a working IIS Server back, but still no intranet site.

I tried restoring from a backup (both through the server admin console and using stsadm -o restore), but unfortunately, no success. (it did however create a clean new working Site). Both way’s errored out saying the backup was corrupt.

A strange detail, I believe, is that the Sharepoint Central Administration has not been affected at all. Neither are two ASP.Net applications that are not using WSS, but are hosted under the same IIS website.

For now, If you read this, and are administrating IIS Sharepoint services sites, please be very carefull with KB973917. I found many people in the same situation, and Microsoft rushed an article with the problem, and possible solution.

… I wish I found this before trying to fix this in the blind…

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2009746

After looking into this for the last 5 day’s, I now believe I have the following options:

• Continue troubleshooting. I would really like to know if I can restore/repair the database, and this way restore most of the information in it.
• Setup a new server, start from scratch. Use the lessons learned and create an improved version.

Of course, option 1 is he preferred one. By me, and by everyone who deposited confidence in the intranet and used it to store their business data.

This will be my quest these day’s.

I will try to keep the blog up to date with the advance’s I’ll be making, either starting from scratch or trying to restore the data. Also, I’d like to explain the cause of all this a bit more, But I’d have to calm down a bit first….  :D

The Intranet is Dead… Long live the intranet!

The release of the Intranet

As I mentioned in one of the last posts, we released the first build of our Intranet site, built on Windows Sharepoint Services.

The release went very well. Mainly because of the preparation and planning on forehand. I am now (2 months down the line) seeing some things that could have gone a bit faster or differently.

We built and configured the server first, set up the outgoing mail settings, and the main structure of the site. After that we started setting up all the standard content for the sub sites, such as the calendars, some templates and so on.

When the main structure was set-up, we moved to the front page. We made a static block in which we added a lot of links to pages we believed would be either difficult to find or needed more attention. Also we created templates for the announcements from different departments.

When we where ready, we organised small sessions in which the team leaders could go, or send people from their teams to. Since we are mainly a call-center, it si hard to get people off the phone, so these sessions took about 30 minutes and spanned the whole day during 4 day’s. This, we believed, would give everybody interested the chance to have a look.

To remove administrative overhead, and also make sure the intranet will be used by the staff (of all levels) we decided to ask for volunteers in each team to administrate their account sites. This generated some quite positive feedback, and within a week, I had the team of administrators complete.

This created a small gap. I did not expect to have the team of admins ready that soon. Therefore, had no training material ready yet. The problem here is, that as soon as the site went online, the last think I want to think about now is writing How-To documents!  Therefore, be advised, make sure all documentation is ready before!

For the launch we started 3 competitions:

• The Naming competition, to get a name for our intranet, untill now we where still using the server name to access.
• The Logo or Template Design competition and a
• Bug Hunt. I hid images of little bugs in the site, and people had to find one, and accompany it’s location with a real Bug in the site.

The Bug hunt, really helped me a lot in the first day’s to get a list of all the little things I still had to work on/fix. To be honest I can really recommend something alike.

These competitions really helped to get most of the people online. That together with the Site-Admins, coming from all levels in the organisation and from all teams.

Aside from the standard set-up, I have also been creating some List templates, for things we know will be used in several Sites, and can be easily set-up this way. Examples are FAQ, Policies & Procedure Libraries, etc.

Resuming the first two months, I am very impressed by the capabilities of WSS, out of the box. Also about the manageability and ease with you can set up basic lists forms and such. Well, the fact of me, Solo, running an intranet for 350 employees divided in 25 teams while developing applications speaks for itself.

I am sure that my enthusiasm for this platform will diminish, as soon as I will try to customise a bit further than the help-file likes… after all, this is a Microsoft product

At the moment, I am looking into two different things. I am trying to find out how (if..?)  the custom workflows work, and trying to publish a .Net application I built in the sharepoint site as a webpart.

To be continued…!

New Toy!

This summer, just a week before going to Brasil, I received a new gadget (I prefer to call them Toy’s). The Nokia 5800 Xpress Music.

I love it! Really, it joins together the kind of functionality you’d like in a mobile device. It has a few drawbacks which I can imagine more advanced and experienced smart-phone users miss. However for me, as the first phone with a camera on it (..!!..) I love it!

PRO’s

• WiFi
• GPS
• 3.2 mp Camera + Low res camera for video calls (if you do any ?)
• position sensor (screen rotates as you rotate the phone)
• Easy to extend, make your own apps and widgets
• Quite long battery life

CON’s

• No keyboard (on screen keyboard works fine though)
• GPS is slow, assisted GPS uses a GPRS carrier making it very expensive (believe me! I was roaming in Brasil and forgot to switch that off :S )
• 3.2 mp Camera is considered low res for some people nowadays’
• Not too many free applications to download
• Menu’s too static, no real (android) desktop feeling

Im really impressed! I have seen the iPhone, and thought it was too big. The blackberries…, I simply find they have too much of the “Business Flavour” and are just boring (sorry!?). The only phone I actually had in my hand and can be seen as serious competition, is the HTC Touch running the Android OS. I liked the Desktop idea I miss a bit on the 5800. This all, looking at the low cost range of course!

I already built a small application for it, a rip of the iPhone mosquito repellant. If you’re interested, drop me a comment, and I can send you a copy.

It is all Over, It is all starting… again!

The holiday season officially ended yesterday with the Kids going back to school in Spain. Bad Weather came to Barcelona this weekend, with the local weatherman declaring the end of summer. My holiday’s ended already more than a month ago, and it looks like there will be none at least untill X-mas. It is all over!

The last few months where great though! I really enjoyed my trip to Brasil, and the summer months in Barcelona are great too. The Neighbourhood parties, day’s and Nights at the beach and loads of Kite Flying!

I really managed to recharge batteries for the sprint ’till christmas. Due to the above reasons, it has been really quiet here (on this blog). The last post was even before FC Barcelona won the 3 titles they opted for and broke almost all historical records.

At work quite some things changed too! The management structure has been made more agile and I moved to a new team. At the moment, we are analysing my Job-Title, and description, to see if it still fits my position.

The new team I am working in now is called Service Assurance. This name explains most of what this team takes care of. Make sure the service is running, work on improvements and raise the quality of the work done. I also increased a level within my position, meaning … a little bit more cash in hand, and quite some more responsibilities and tasks.

The good news here is that in my new team I am tasked with the Intranet project. This is nothing new, but the new part is that I can dedicate 100% of my time to it, and I can make use of more resources.

During the last month, I have been working hard to get the first version of the Intranet online. It is there, and we launched it officially last week.

Since I changed teams, I am managed differently. Differently in Italic, as I was very close to write better. To be honest, there where quite a lot of discrepancies between me and my manager in many things. Even though I could understand, or at least try to understand most of his decisions. Now I have a new manager. after now 2 months, I can easily say I have the feeling we are on the same line. Which is good. This helps me a lot in Completing projects, as I have a sense of support from higher up the chain, which I had the feeling I lacked a bit before.

As I mentioned before the intranet project is really getting a shape. We have launched the first version running on a small (20gb) Virtual 2003 Server running WSS. This is, after all the investigation and plan-making a lot less than we originally aimed for, and the effect is visible.  Now we have to start making a case to upgrade the server to a full moss, and an SQL server for storage.

We also decided to make release 1 of the intranet as standard as possible. Fully based on templates, and only a few custom lists. This to make sure we could build a case for a more expensive MOSS Server (the idea was that if we could show that we could do it, we’d have a better buy-in from the management team).

To be honest, the possibilities of the standard WSS installation, with the 40 Famous Microsoft templates is giving us about 75% of all the functionality required.  The gaps we have identified will be mostly filled when we move to a full MOSS Server and are mostly related on how we store information and to align that with the spanish law on data protection.

Today, first 1-2-1 personal review with my new manager. She was happy, the intranet is there, on time and with a lot more functionality then we all expected… -> Im Happy!

It is all starting again!

Messi para Iniesta, xuta Iniesta…..

I Gooool!!!

Aquí teniu el fragment d’audio del gol d’aquesta setmana. Possiblement el millor que es pot baixar de l’internet en aquest moment

(en mp3, així ho pots posar en el mobil)

Here’s the audio fragment (the one I liked most) from the goal against Chelsea in the Champions league Semi-final:

http://alex.k.bcn.googlepages.com/GOL3.mp3

!!Gol de lo puto gusiluz!!

Planning the Intranet IV

This morning I finished building the WSS Webserver we will use to build our intranet on. To be fair, it was very straight forward and did not gave me any issues aside form the speed, as I was working on a VM copy of the real server.

I made a virtual copy of the live server, to do a test run of the set-up. I used the VMware converter which is simple to use, and gives me an exact copy of the live server. I used this to complete the setup and configuration. This way, if any problems appear, I am aware of them and can prevent them from occurring on the live machine.

I did however encounter one small issue, which is completely my “fault”. I did not check in advance how to set up the email configuration for outgoing and incoming mail. The server is a standalone installation, not part of a farm, and I believe the WSS server, although standalone, should be able to benefit from the UK exchange environment for the mailing purposes.

Another thing I now have to have a look at is the way we will “upload” the custom applications we will be building. My best guess is that we will set up a site in IIS for each which we will link to from within the WSS site. However, I would have to have a look on how this can be done. Shared folder, Frontpage extensions, don’t know yet. We will be developing in wither visual studio, or on the VS Web developer express edition, and I’m not 100% sure what is the best way to publish the applications we build in there.

Planning the Intranet III

For about 5 years I have been working with IBM software. Mostly using Lotus Domino and Notes, designing applications. However I also looked at other technologies, like Websphere and DB2.

I have recently switched (well, I’m still switching) to comparable products from Microsoft. Mainly becasue the company I work for made the decision to stop using IBM for their internal mail and databases.

I do however believe that IBM, known as Big Blue, a big and slow organisation, was ahead of Microsoft concerning intranet software and ease of development back in the day’s they launched Websphere. I have been looking at an article on their website, that states that in 2006, their Intranet was listed in the Nielsen Norman Group Report: Intranet Design Annual 2006: Year’s Ten Best Intranets.

I never heard of that report before, and headed straight over for a look: http://www.nngroup.com/reports/intranet/design/. The report is for sale. 224$ and its yours. For me that is too expensive, and Im sure that my boss (who is likely to leave soon), would have a good laugh if I walk over to ask him for the money!

(reports from previous years still cost about 200$, which I still find very steep!)

However, it gave me a good impression what points to look at for our Intranet:

Some of the key areas for which best practices are presented in the report are:

• Company and industry news
• Integrating internal and external information sources
• Editorial control of the intranet homepage
• Keeping the intranet up-to-date
• CEO blogging
• Employee and department weblogs
• Onboarding of new employees
• Consistent navigation
• Multilingual intranets; supporting international employees
• Multimedia and video on intranets
• Data visualization
• Web 2.0 features on intranets
• Community
• Polls
• Collaboration tools and discussion boards
• Internal wikis
• Employee self service
• Search
• Governance
• Development process for intranet redesigns
• Web analytics for intranets
• Staffing of intranet teams; where they report in the organization
• Updating and maintaining standards and guidelines for intranet design
• Intranet branding
• Promoting new intranet features
• Staff directory and employee profile pages
• Corporate calendars
• Personalization
• Customization
• Alerts
• Working with external design agencies

These points are things (call them features) they look at when evaluating intranet sites. I believe this to be a very complete list, and I’m sure that in a company our size (just looking at our office in Spain, we are about 300 people) can and will have to remove some of the points. Either because of difficulty of implementation (read: cost), Irrelevance or plain Overkill.

It looks like we have a Feature Checklist, with which we can start planning!

Intranet budgets and staffing

Planning the Intranet II

Seems like someone in the company has read the post about the intranet re-design. We received communication that a complete organisational layer will be disappearing! This was actually what I hoped for because I firmly believe in flat layered organisations. From what Ive seen in different companies, is that flatter organisations tend to embrace employee empowerment, are quicker in their decision making and more flexible in fast moving/changing markets (like the IT business we operate in).

I also believe that this will enable me to design the intranet in a much more useful way. The platforms we implemented lately are web based platforms to enable and improve both horizontal and vertical communication. My biggest fear was that with the classic org-chart the company has here these platforms would not be used to the fullest. Especially when I received the first ideas from management, in which they actually wanted to implement the full structure of the organisation in the intranet design.

As it looks now, I’d have to go back to the drawing board, which I’m happy with, because now it looks like we can design a modern intranet, that will actually enable cross-team communication and combine that with a sound knowledge management strategy.

eeePC Upgrade

Yesterday afternoon I read about the new Ubuntu version (9.04) which was just launched, the Jaunty Jackalope.

I had a look and thought it would be interesting to install, but noticed some other distributions for netbooks. Among which the moblin (moblin.org). This interested me, as Im allway’s into trying out something different. I downloaded the image and used the Ubuntu DiskImager tool to get it on a 4Gb USB stick. This all worked fine!

The tool is great, I have been doing magic in the past to make a bootable USB install which is now a piece of cake! I set-up the Eee Bios to boot from it, and it presented me with a nice bootmenu. But any option I selected, left me with a black screen and an eternal hourglass. I tried switching to console, but it did not let me log in!

So, after a few hours I decided to get the Ubuntu IMG for Netbook remix, and give it a go. To be fair, a piece of cake! in about 45 minutes I had a running system. Another hour to get all the updates, and that’s it!

The touchpad and the wifi worked fine directly. It also detected the screen resolution fine. I switched back to the standard desktop because I hardly used the netbook remix mode from the Easypeasy distro.

Thats all for the moment. One of these day’s Ill try to fine-tune it a bit more as from my first impression it was running a bit slow. Ill keep you posted!

ah, and I have one question which people might be able to respond… why is everything Brown in ubuntu?