Eric Cherng

A question came up last week in what permissions does the account that SharePoint uses to connect to SQL need. Unfortunatey I couldn't find the answer to this after doing some internet searches so I just decided to give it a try and see.

After installing MOSS 2007, setup will bring up the SharePoint Products and Technologies Configuration Wizard. Essentially this wizard creates the Central Administration site so you can setup the rest of your MOSS installation.

Obviously the first security check is to make sure your user account running setup has permissions on the database server to create new databases. The wizard to create the Central Administration site will be running in your user account context to create the database so you have to at least have permissions to create a new database. Your user account should also have permissions to create a new IIS site, but since this post is about the database, I'll leave that topic for a future post.

Second user account you have to consider is the user account you specified in the wizard that SharePoint uses to connect to the database. SharePoint will be using this account not only to read and write to existing databases, it will also use this account to create new databases when you create a new SharePoint web application. Therefore a simple datareader or datawriter role is not enough.

Turns out the wizard will take care of adding the user you specified into SQL Server and then assigning the necessary server role. In my test install, it looks like SharePoint requires the dbcreator and the securityadmin server role for the user account.

Down to the security for the specific database, the user account is granted db_owner permissions.

Another note on picking the user account for SharePoint to use to access the database, if you are doing a multi-server installation of SharePoint, make sure to use a domain account. You could also create a shadow account, but that is not a recommended way of installation.

I'm running Outlook 2007 Beta 2 Technical Refresh on my desktop. Just now I got a reminder for a meeting, so as usual, I set Outlook to remind me 5 minutes before the meeting starts. I wasn't ready for Outlook's response:

Followed by this:

Well OK then Outlook. How about I just dismiss the reminder? Nope:

Please Outlook! I'm begging you! 

Does your SharePoint My Site show your domain username instead of your full name? We noticed this behavior during our test installation of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 Beta 2 Technical Refresh. After tesing out different theories of why this was happening, we realized that the reason for this is because the identity of the application pool for the SharePoint site was using a local machine account instead of a domain account. Since the account was a local machine account, it doesn't have permissions to look up your user account information in the domain Active Directory... makes sense.

So the solution to this problem is to change the identity of the application pool. In order to do this, you will need to go to your SharePoint Central Administration page. Click the Service accounts option under the Security Configuration section.

In the Service Accounts page, change the Credential Management radio button to Web application pool. In the drop down, select Windows SharePoint Services Web Application. In the Application pool drop down, select the application pool you want to change the identity of.

Now the bottom controls should be enabled to allow you to change the identity of the application pool.

Once you're done entering in the user account and click OK, SharePoint will alert you to run IISRESET in order for the changes to take effect.

Once you run IISRESET /noforce, your app pool should now be running under the new identity. If you are in doubt, check Task Manager on the server and you should see the w3wp.exe process running with the new identity.

Also a warning, don't change the application pool user account through IIS Manager. If you do so, SharePoint's configuration will not be in sync with the app pool's identity and may also cause your web site to fail to load. I got this warning message in Event Viewer:

The identity of application pool 'SharePoint - 80' is invalid, so the World Wide Web Publishing Service can not create a worker process to serve the application pool. Therefore, the application pool has been disabled.

followed by this error message:

A failure was encountered while launching the process serving application pool 'SharePoint - 80'. The application pool has been disabled.

Games are a big part of the Vertigo culture. Nearly all our developers play some kind of game every once in a while. Just taking a look at some of our gaming posts we've done probably shows this. ;)

With Vista, games are getting high priority as well with a top level Start Menu shortcut. Here's a peak at the Games Start Menu item in Vista RC1.

Once you open the Games folder, you see all the games on your system. Looks like Windows comes with some new games now.

If you hit the Tools button, all the important Game-related functions and settings are located here. Very useful.

Finally you can customize the Game folder by clicking on the Options button, which brings up this dialog.

I'm assuming future games with the Games for Windows logo will automatically add game shortcuts directly in the Games folder.

What's new with these games?

• Chess takes 15 seconds to load on my Thinkpad T60. While it takes forever to load, it looks very pretty with real time reflections of the pieces on the board and free rotation.
• Minesweeper has some really nice animations now. Make sure you make the window larger if you have a high resolution monitor. Otherwise you won't be able to see all the graphical details.
• Solitaire has updated cards and nice transition animations (flipping cards, moving cards).

Also, you might notice your game icons shuffling around the Game folder once you start playing games. They are moving around because by default the icons are sorted by Last played, so as you play the games, the icons are resorting themselves.

Update 9/19/2006 1:03 pm

Jeff sent me a screenshot of a new game he installed on his Vista machine. Looks like I was right in thinking games would install a shortcut in the Games folder. Although the WEI score requirement looks fishy.. only a 1.0?

Just a heads up to everyone thinking about installing Office 2007 Beta 2 Technical Refresh (B2TR), the download is a patch and not a full install. This mean you must have Office 2007 Beta 2 installed before patching to B2TR.

Our local guinea pig, Adrian, (just kidding ) uninstalled Office 2007 before installing B2TR and he encountered this error dialog:

This blog post on the SharePoint team blog announced this particular update process, but it wasn't clear from the post whether this happens for all Office 2007 Beta 2 products or just SharePoint. I just wish the download link for B2TR was clearer about this.

I've always found it difficult to remember where all the folders SharePoint uses are and what each folder is used for. So here's my attempt to consolidate this information in one post for easy reference. This post assumes default folder locations. Obviously if you customized anything, then you're on your own.

WSS/SharePoint Server Program Folder

C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\12

C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office Servers\12.0 (not sure about this)

This is where most of the program files for SharePoint live.

WSS/SharePoint Binaries

C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\12\BIN

This contains the executable binaries used with SharePoint. For example, stsadm.exe and the WSS Timer service, owstimer.exe, is located here.

WSS/SharePoint Server Assemblies, ASPX, ASMX

C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\12\ISAPI

Contains most of the ASPX (ASP.NET Web Forms) and ASMX (ASP.NET Web Services) files of SharePoint. Also if you are writing code that uses the SharePoint assemblies (ie. Microsoft.SharePoint.dll, Microsoft.SharePoint.Server.dll, ...), then the assemblies you need are located in this folder.

SharePoint Logs

C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\12\LOGS

SharePoint told you to check the logs? This is where you can find the raw log files.

SharePoint Site Features

C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\12\TEMPLATE\FEATURES

Looks like this is where all the SharePoint Features metadata is stored.

Site Layout Template

C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\12\TEMPLATE\LAYOUTS

This is the folder where the virtualized _layouts path for each site URL is located. Add additional files in here to have it be available to all sites.

SharePoint Setup Cache

C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\SERVER12\Server Setup Controller

Looks like this is where SharePoint Setup stores the setup configuration. If you have Office installed as well, then this folder is also used for them.

Web Application Virtual Directories

C:\Inetpub\wwwroot\wss\VirtualDirectories

The folder where your SharePoint web applications point to.

Web Application web.config

C:\Inetpub\wwwroot\wss\VirtualDirectories\[web application]\web.config

Need to customize the web.config for a particular web application? This is the web.config that you want to edit. Replace [web application] to your web application first of course.

Install Web Parts per Web Application in here

C:\Inetpub\wwwroot\wss\VirtualDirectories\[web application]\_app_bin

Additional assemblies (ie. custom web parts) are installed here on a per web application basis. You can also install Web Parts to the GAC as well to be accessible in all web applications on the server.

This post compliments my post on SharePoint 2007's registry locations.

If anyone knows of any other interesting folder locations, let me know so I can add them here.

A couple of us went out to lunch yesterday to a nearby mall and noticed an interesting photo booth.

Upon closer inspection, we noticed this on the screen:

If you happened to be a customer who didn't notice the screen outside, this is what you see inside:

If you can't tell, that is Linux booting up and looks to be stalled. It looks like the video drivers are having some issues. I just love seeing crashed systems in public and for once it's not Windows or DOS!  

Sorry for the bad picture quality. All I had was my camera phone at the time.

Mike and I noticed this earlier at the game store:

Looks like the Vista Logo. Is that how all future Windows PC games will be branded? Interesting...

The new Start Menu in Vista features a power button next to the Search bar. What do you think will happen when you click the power button? Since it's the power button, you would expect it to shut down the computer right? Well too bad that's not the default behavior. Instead, by default the power button is configured to go on standby when you click the power button. Um.. is it just me or does that just not make sense?

I realize Microsoft's goal is to make computing more like a home appliance: shutdown really means standby so you can start up your computer immediately (just like you startup your TV immediately). Personally I use my hardware buttons to make my computer go into Standby, and then use the Start Menu's power button to shut down Windows. So as you can probably guess, I hate how the power button doesn't shutdown my computer anymore. Plus also old habits die hard.

So if you want to change this, you'll have to do the following.

First you'll need to go to the Power Options. This is easier said than done. If you are using the categorized Control Panel, you can get to it by going:

Control Panel > Hardware and Sound > Change battery settings

and no, Change what the power buttons do does not work. That changes what happens with your physical power buttons, not the Start menu power button.

If you have the Classic View control panel, go this path:

Control Panel > Power Options

Next follow this path, which is the same for both Control Panel styles:

Change plan settings under Balanced > Change advanced power settings > expand Power buttons and lid > expand Start menu power button

and from here you can finally change this configuration. Yes, that is a total of 7 clicks just to change the power button configuration! If you didn't follow those steps, take a look at this series of screenshots:

Is it just me or did Microsoft make this REALLY complex to change? I had to dig around for 5 minutes before I finally found this!

And to make matters worse, remember earlier we selected the Balance power plan? Well these settings are per plan. That means if you change your plan, the Power button gets reset to Standby again! You'll have to individually configure each Power plan to make the power button be the same for all plans. Why can't we have a "Override all power plan" option? What a pain!

One last thing to notice, check out the first Start menu, and then this Start menu:

See anything different? The new Start menu now shows the power button as red instead of the original yellowish color. This is the visual cue that the power button now means Shutdown (red) instead of Standby (yellow). Personally I would prefer if the tooltip would just immediately popped up when the mouse hovers over the button and simplify the message to "Shutdown" instead of "Closes all open programs, shuts down Windows, and then turns off your computer" or "Standby" instead of "Keeps your session in memory and puts the computer in a low-power state so that you can quickly resume working." Geez what a mouthfull!

I just found an interesting bug in Firefox v1.5.0.6 when running in Vista RC1.

If you delete all your bookmarks in your Bookmark Toolbar, the display/browser area of Firefox goes crazy and twitches up and down. Only when you add something back into the Bookmark Toolbar does it stop twitching. Check out this animated gif of this behavior:

I know it's hard to see, but the twitching motion just keeps going and is very fast. The twitching happens to all Firefox windows with the Bookmark toolbar visible. I don't think anything bad happens, it just gets annoying after the first 5 seconds of finding it funny.

The 2 ways I found to fix this is to:

1. Add something back into your Bookmarks Toolbar .. or ...
2. Remove the Bookmarks Toolbar.

I guess it's bugs like these why the Mozilla team has accepted Microsoft's invitation to help make sure Firefox works on Vista. Other than this weird twitching, I haven't noticed any other problems running Firefox on Vista.

Another in my series of Vista posts. Ever found it annoying when you rename a file in Windows Explorer the default selection is the entire file: filename and extension? Like this:

I just found out Vista took a page from the GNOME book and finally changed this behavior. Vista now does the same thing as GNOME: selects the file name without the file extension!

Of course the same thing happens when you create a new file as well.

Great stuff!

Wondering where SharePoint 2007 lives in the registry? Probably not, but here you go anyways.

Windows SharePoint Services (WSS) 3.0 is:

HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Shared Tools\Web Server Extensions\12.0\

Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007 is:

HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Office Server\12.0\

The usual warnings of the registry apply. You edit the registry at your own risk. I will not be held responsible for any actions you take with your registry settings!

Warnings aside, it's pretty interesting to see what goes on under the covers!

I recently had to move a site collection from one MOSS 2007 Beta 2 server to a VPC for archiving purposes. Even though SharePoint now has an easy way to backup/restore through Central Admin, I found the easiest way to get everything working with control over the process was through the command line admin tool provided by SharePoint: stsadm.exe.

Before running these commands, make sure the SharePoint bin directory is in your path. The SharePoint bin directory is by default located in C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\12\BIN.

To back up a site collection, run this command:

stsadm -o backup -url <url> -filename <filename>

where <url> is the url of your site collection and <filename> is the file you want to backup to.

To restore the site collection, run this command:

stsadm -o restore -url <url> -filename <filename> -overwrite

where <url> is the url you want to restore the backup into and <filename> is the backup file.

The -overwrite flag is used to overwrite the existing site if it already exists. However be careful that you don't overwrite an existing working site. You can always run the restore first without the -overwrite flag to determine if you need the overwrite flag. The command will let you know if an existing site is already located at the url you specified. During my testing, I restored a site in the wrong place with the overwrite flag completely killing the original site. Thankfully I backed up everything before I made any changes.

One thing to watch out for when you restore onto a different server is the security. During my first attempt, my user account was not admin of the site collection. Backup went without any problems, but restoring would fail midstream. Turns out the restore process restored the original security permissions to the site. Once authorization kicked in, my account failed the security check causing the entire restore process to fail with a half restored site. If this happens to you, edit the existing site so that you have the needed permissions to perform the backup/restore, then backup/restore again.

Another tip when using the stsadm command is to make sure you review exactly what data is being backed up. Remember the command backs up only the site collection, so anything outside of the site collection scope is not included. Typical data outside of the site collection that still may effect your site include:

• Application settings in Central Admin
• Shared Services settings (search scopes, audiences, excel services, ...)
• Sub site collections

The last bullet is important to watch out for as I later found out that my original backup didn't include any sub site collections. Turns out personal sites (My Site for each user account) are sub site collections of the main site collection. If you just backup the main site collection for personal sites, this does not include any data of the sub site collections. You will have to backup those individually.

Here's what a window looks like in Vista when it's Not Responding:

Here's what the window looks like when it is running properly:

Pretty neat effect indicating a broken window, unlike XP's half drawn window. What would be even better, is if it actually drew a crack as if it really IS a broken window!

I noticed with the crashing version of the window is there actually is a menu and window title associated with the window. Why does Vista hide this leaving just empty space in the normal running Explorer?

Being the nerd that I am, instead of spending Labor Day weekend grilling hot dogs, I spent my weekend installing Vista RC1 on my laptop (IBM/Lenovo Thinkpad T60 2623-D7U).

Similar to Scott's experience, my installation went smooth as well. Aero worked out of the box. I was able to get a WEI score of 4.0 (sorry Scott, but my laptop pwned yours ). I also couldn't get audio to work out of the box.

And for those who don't have a chance to try out the new build yet, here's a visual walkthrough of the installation on my laptop.

Choose your language:

Let's do it!

Usual enter your key. Unlike XP, this is the 3rd dialog in Vista!

Do you agree?

Custom installation!

Select your parition.

Installing...

Reboot... please wait.

More installing...

Your name and picture.

What is the name of your computer?

Secure computing, Microsoft's way!

Select your time zone and your time

You're welcome!

More waiting and more installing...

Yay! Finally at the login screen!

The anticipation builds...

Woohoo! Done!

After installing Windows XP for the past 5 years, the Vista setup visually seems light years ahead. Contrary to XP's NT-like setup process (DOS phase, copy files, then Windows phase), Vista has a complete GUI setup experience. Unfortunately the much touted image setup process didn't improve much on the time it takes to install. It took me 40 minutes from the first picture I took above up to when I finally was able to use my computer. A little shorter than XP's installation time, but not by much.

One thing I noticed with Vista's setup that I found very annoying is the lack of any status indicator. Everything is abstracted with generic messages like "Installing features" or "Please wait a moment while Windows prepares to start for the first time..." with the dots going on and on. Instead of endless dots (or endless rotations of an animated circle), I would much prefer to see which files are being copied or at least a progress bar to show how much is left of the install. How about a time estimate like XP's setup?

While I understand Microsoft is trying to make everything more user friendly, I doubt most home users would be performing Windows setup anyways. I know from personal experience, most friends/family call me up if they have any trouble with their computer and I usually end up reinstalling Windows for them if needed. Therefore, why make setup so abstract like this? Give us some status! At least it gives us something to look at while we sit around for 40 minutes. I sure hope RTM will not be this abstract.

Well that's it for setup. Hope you enjoyed this visual walkthrough!