Is your company still running SharePoint 2007? Has your company been considering an upgrade to SharePoint 2010? Well here’s another compelling reason to upgrade – Microsoft’s Mainstream Support will end on 10/9/2012.

See this link for more information…
http://support.microsoft.com/lifecycle/search/default.aspx?sort=PN&qid=&alpha=SharePoint+Server+2007&Filter=FilterNO

What does this mean? Here is Microsoft’s explanation on what that means…

What is the difference between Mainstream Support, Extended Support, and online self-help support?

Note: A hotfix is a modification to the commercially available Microsoft product software code to address specific critical problem

See this link for the FAQ…
http://support.microsoft.com/gp/lifepolicy

What is your upgrade plan?

Restoring a Shared Service Provider can be a frustrating task. Especially when the feedback you get from STSADM doesn’t help. For example, when the SSP has not been deleted before doing a NEW Restore, the Shared Search Service restore will stall at 90%. It will stay at 90% until you kill the process (CTRL+C).

Make sure that you delete ALL associated DBs. STSADM will ask you for a new name for each DB before it tries to restore them, so you could delete DBs as it asks if you aren’t sure.

It is also recommended that you stop the SPSearch service. Here is the process for restoring a SSP…

Stop Search: (Delete the Search Index when asked)
stsadm -o spsearch -action stop

Delete all SSP DBs and Search DBs.  If you are not restoring ALL of you SSPs, then make sure you only delete the DB for your SSP(s).

Get Backup GUID Command:
stsadm -o backuphistory -directory

SSP Restore Command: (Restore all SSPs)
stsadm -o restore -directory -restoremethod new -backupid -newdatabaseserver

Reset IIS Command:
iisreset /noforce

As a SharePoint developer, I have learned many things the hard way.  One of the most important things that I learned early on was to dispose of your SPSite and SPWeb objects.  They do not dispose cleanly on their own.  If you have custom code that is being called hundreds or thousands of times a day, then your application will more than likely crash IIS.

There are 2 main ways that I have seen developers dispose of these objects.  The first is to call the Dispose() method on each object.  The second, I think, is the best method, and that is to use the Using statement.  It makes it impossible to forget to dispose of the objects.  Here’s how to use it…

using (SPSite site = new SPSite("http://www.myserver.com")) {
     using (SPWeb web = SPSite.OpenWeb()) {
          //Your code here!
     }
}

If you put all of your code where the “//Your code here!” statement is then you will never have to worry about disposing of the objects.  Even if the code throws an exception, the objects will be disposed of.  However, you should still put try-catch statements around your code to catch any errors that may occur.

If you need help checking your code for non-disposed objects, then check the SPDisposeCheck tool out.

SharePoint’s security model can be very granular, but it lacks a feature. The ability to control who can add/edit/delete folders. This can be very useful when an organization needs to control it’s folder structure within a document library. The only way that I have found to do this is to create an event handler on the library. Read more >>

I have seen a few good posts on updating BDC data columns from workflows utilizing web service tasks but haven’t seen any that are straight to the point and work well for all situations.  The specific situation in the scenario I wanted to solve was updating a BDC list item based on a part number entered into the title column so that users could reference associated data.  I did this by passing the site, list id and row id as a parameter to a ASP.Net web service from a Nintex Workflow.  Here is the webservice code to find the list row and update the BDC data column without using the _ID hidden fields. Read more >>