Installing a new development portal today, the Shared Service installation failed. It didn't provision properyl, so wouldn't delete in the UI.

I used the stsadm command - stsadm -o deletessp -title <title> -deletedatabases to remove it, but initially, this also failed. However, it seems that running the command another 2 times, it clears the provider...

first time - generic error message
second time - error regarding sites in use
third time - success

So, if you have problems deleting a SSP, try running the command a couple of times - it might help you also

On more than one occassion, I get into argument with people supporting OpenSource / FSF software. Its not that I do not approve of Free software.. on the other hand I am quite an enthusiastic supporter of sites such as SourceForge, CodeProject, CodePlex and Google Code. Its the attitude of the people I talk with, that gets to me... they seem to think that just because the software is free, it is automatically better than any paid software. Worse are the allegations that because the code is community supported, it automatically makes them more stable and robust. One such similar debate that I recently had was a comparision of Sharepoint with an Open Source CMS. The person's theory was that many corporations were now using this product, it automatically made the product the best choice. I am yet to see a major corporation to completely replace their commercial software with open source alternatives. Open source is an attractive solution to small scale businesses whose budget is highly constrained. Even if that were the case, in this particular argument it had no strength simply because comparing an Open Source CMS with Sharepoint is jus plain wrong. While sharepoint can perform the duties of a CMS (and quite reliablely I might add) it is much more than just a CMS. Sharepoint is a set of services or rather a framework of services which are designed to perform a number of tasks including that of a CMS. An OpenSource CMS, or atleast the ones I have had the opportunity of seeing are more user oriented in terms of their backend administration. They have a clean and easy to use backend to simplify things for an administrator who doesn't have any experience in dealing with code and such complexities. Sharepoint on the other hand is more like clay .. you can mould it into whatever you want. You can even develop a user friendly administrative backend for a custom web service that you have just developed. You can integrate your existing services with more Microsoft products such as Dynamics and manage all your Microsoft Office documents. Can any other open source CMS claim to do all of this? I haven't seen one yet. Sharepoint Services also consists of Search Server, which allows you to build your very own personalized search engine for documents and such.  

Furthermore support is a major issue in open source software. If something goes wrong, then there is no single place where you can go to resolve the issue. With microsoft, all it takes is one single email for help to their support help desk. Many people claim that there are one too many bugs with Microsoft products. Again, if there is a bug, Microsoft promptly issues a fix to the problem. With the open source community there is no set deadline for fixing issues. The developer might be on an idefinite hiatus from development while you are stuck with a broken service/product which is affecting your clients or your own business. Atleast with Microsoft most of the bugs are documented. With open source software there might be issues which have been found but no one has reported yet. If there is a bug in a service I am making use if, I would atleast like to know that is exists so that I can possibly work around it while a fix is being developed.. with open source there is no such possibility unless the developers can come up with a fix or a solution to workaround the problem. Sure other contributors can make suggestions, but how do you trust an uncertified unknown stranger giving you advice to fix a critical service instrumental to your business or to your customer?

 I am not trying to say OpenSource software is not good enough. I am just trying to say that a comparision between an open source CMS and sharepoint is really not fair since Sharepoint is so much more than just a simple CMS. Its purpose is so much more different than that of a CMS.  They both have their advantages and their disadvantages and they are more or less suited to rather specific situations in my opinion. 

We all have secrets at one point of time or the other in our lives. And now we use computers to hide these secrets of ours. As encrypted files protected with passwords, hidden drives, pen drives. Cryptography seems to have made things so much more easier. Its strange than whenever someone says cryptography, everyone thinks of a modern computer with scrolling lines of codes and cryptic passwords...the truth is, cryptography has been around us for thousands of years. Atbash and Caesar's algorithms are two of the more famous examples. These are simple substitution and transpositional algorithms.

Cryptography was used extensively during World War II, with a plethora of code and cipher systems fielded by the nations involved. In addition, the theoretical and practical aspects of cryptanalysis, or codebreaking, was much advanced. Probably the most important cryptographic event of the war was the successful decryption by the Allies of the German "Enigma" Cipher. The first complete break into Enigma was accomplished by Poland around 1932; the techniques and insights used were passed to the French and British Allies just before the outbreak of the War in 1939. They were substantially improved by British efforts at the Bletchley Park research station during the War. Decryption of the Enigma Cipher allowed the Allies to read important parts of German radio traffic on important networks and was an invaluable source of military intelligence throughout the War. Intelligence from this source (and other high level sources, including the Fish cyphers) was eventually called Ultra. A similar break into an important Japanese cypher (PURPLE) by the US Army Signals Intelligence Service started before the US entered the War. Product from this source was called MAGIC. It was the highest security Japanese diplomatic cypher. For Japanese Naval cyphers see JN-25.

Modern computers have given us the ability to come up with more complex methods of encrypting data. Blowfish, DES/3DES, AES are examples of some of the encryption methods which are in use today. Quantum cryptography has gained popularity in the recent past few months. Quantum cryptography, or quantum key distribution (QKD), uses quantum mechanics to guarantee secure communication. It enables two parties to produce a shared random bit string known only to them, which can be used as a key to encrypt and decrypt messages.

An important and unique property of quantum cryptography is the ability of the two communicating users to detect the presence of any third party trying to gain knowledge of the key. This results from a fundamental part of quantum mechanics: the process of measuring a quantum system in general disturbs the system. A third party trying to eavesdrop on the key must in some way measure it, thus introducing detectable anomalies. By using quantum superpositions or quantum entanglement and transmitting information in quantum states, a communication system can be implemented which detects eavesdropping. If the level of eavesdropping is below a certain threshold a key can be produced which is guaranteed as secure (i.e. the eavesdropper has no information about), otherwise no secure key is possible and communication is aborted. The security of quantum cryptography relies on the foundations of quantum mechanics, in contrast to traditional public key cryptography which relies on the computational difficulty of certain mathematical functions, and cannot provide any indication of eavesdropping or guarantee of key security. Quantum cryptography is only used to produce and distribute a key, not to transmit any message data. This key can then be used with any chosen encryption algorithm to encrypt (and decrypt) a message, which can then be transmitted over a standard communication channel. The algorithm most commonly associated with QKD is the one-time pad, as it is provably secure when used with a secret, random key.

However we are decades away from an actual implemention of quantum cryptography in real life. But for now, there is way to simulate a quantum key distribution network using the .NET framerwork. Further information can be found here

http://info.fernandolucas.es/drupal/node/12

How many times a day do you go thinking .. 'boy that guy is a real idiot.' ? I come across enough number of people in my normal day to make me start believing that intelligence has not yet been found anywhere in the universe... not even on Earth. May be it is because of this lack of intelligence on our own planet that we are so motivated to find intelligence elsewhere, amongst the stars and in computers. I really have no clue how the star search going but I try to keep myself abreast of any news of Artificial Intelligence. It has always fascinated me, how computers can be taught to understand and react and make decisions on the same scale of intelligence as human beings. Imagine trying to wake up your AI assisted laptop from its sleep mode (which it has put itself into to conserve battery power) only to see an error message popup on to the screen "Go away!! its only 8 o'clock for heaven's sake! Let me sleep for an hour or two and we'll get back to work then!" ... Imagine being able to blame the computer for your behind schedule project .. "It wasn't me!! It was the computer. He refuses to work any faster or for more hours!! He wants more pay (electric/solar power) for overtime!". Leaving my fantasies behind, and looking at the real world, a lot of major breakthroughs have been made in AI. More algorithms and ideologies such as Neural Networks, Fuzzy Logic etc have brought AI to our desktops.

The first actual interest in AI from Microsoft to me came  in the form of Microsoft Bayesian Network Editor that's found here http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/redmond/groups/adapt/msbnx/

MSBNx or Microsoft Bayesian Network Editor is a component-based Windows application for creating, assessing, and evaluating Bayesian Networks, created at Microsoft Research.  The application's installation module includes complete help files and sample networks.  Bayesian Networks are encoded in an XML file format. The application and its components run on Windows 98, Windows 2000, and Windows XP. (taken from Microsoft Research website.) This had no real potential uses .. atleast for me. However more recently, I came across Infer.Net which is a less well known project at Microsoft Research.

Take from the Infer.NET website

"Infer.NET is a .NET framework for machine learning.  It provides state-of-the-art message-passing algorithms and statistical routines for performing Bayesian inference. It has applications in a wide variety of domains including information retrieval, bioinformatics, epidemiology, vision, and many others. Infer.NET is a framework for running Bayesian inference in graphical models. It provides the state-of-the-art message-passing algorithms and statistical routines needed to perform inference for a wide variety of applications. Infer.NET differs from existing inference software in a number of ways:

• Rich modelling language                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                          Support for univariate and multivariate variables, both continuous and discrete. Models can be constructed from a broad range of factors including arithmetic operations, linear algebra, range and positivity constraints, Boolean operators, Dirichlet-Discrete, Gaussian, and many others. Support for hierarchical mixtures with heterogeneous components.
• Multiple inference algorithms
   Built-in algorithms include Expectation Propagation, Belief Propagation (a special case of EP) and Variational Message Passing
•  Designed for large scale inference
   In most existing inference programs, inference is performed inside the program - the overhead of running the program slows down the inference. Instead, Infer.NET compiles models into inference source code which can be executed independently with no overhead. It can also be integrated directly into your application. In addition, the source code can be viewed, stepped through, profiled or modified as needed, using standard development tools.
•  User-extendable
  Probability distributions, factors, message operations and inference algorithms can all be added by the user. Infer.NET uses a plug-in architecture which makes it open-ended and adaptable. Whilst the built-in libraries support a wide range of models and inference operations, there will always be special cases where a new factor or distribution type or algorithm is needed. In this case, custom code can be written and freely mixed with the built-in functionality, minimising the amount of extra work that is needed. 

This seems like an extremely promising addition to the .NET framework. I have just started to plat around with Infer.NET and I can already imagine a million different possibilities. But those are musings for a different blog :)

You can read more about Infer.NET here -> http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/cambridge/projects/infernet/ <-

Adam has a good thought provoking article on Best Practises.  This is something I certainly agree with and have for a long time - whilst a 'best practise' may be the theoretical or purist approach, it is not always the most viable

Happy Holidays

In the link to the online form , you wll have or can specify a property 'Source=' . If this is defined, once the form is closed / submitted, it will redirect to this location.

So for example if you create a 'thank you' page at //url/pages/thankyou.aspx, the URL to the form will include &Source=http%3A%2F%2Furl%2Fpages%2FThankYou%2Easpx

An example URL to a browser form is below:

http://portal2007.development.local/hr/_layouts/FormServer.aspx?XsnLocation=http://mossserver:83/hr/Forms/addresschangeform.xsn&SaveLocation=http%3A%2F%2Fportal2007%2Edevelopment%2Elocal%2Fhr%2FChangeofAddress&Source=http%3A%2F%2Fportal2007%2Edevelopment%2Elocal%2Fhr%2FChangeofAddress%2FForms%2FAllItems%2Easpx&DefaultItemOpen=1

I'm part way through the great book on Search Server 2008. Even using Sharepoint and Search every day, it's still interesting to find the things you don't know (or have forgotten ) about the products.

Some quick notes that I made while reading the book. They are in no particular order, other than I wrote them while reading so probably follow the chapters

If using a separate index server, make it also a Web Front End

The Search Service account will be granted read permissions in the farm and should not be part of the administrators

WSS Search (for searching Help) should be configured to crawl off peak. It only indexes the Help and runs a full crawl each time ?

Look carefully ate crawl impact rules for external sites and check the order of the rules

Schedule any full crawls to run after any daily backup jobs

Manage 'web site' content sources with custom properties and check the hop number (to avoid crawling the net) or set to 'this site only'

You can index Forms Based Authenticated sites using crawl rules and form credentials- point to the login page to crawl

Basic authentication is sent in clear text so implement SSL. You will need to specify the certificate?

You can specify a cookie

Ignore SSL warnings overcomes any self signed certificates

You can configure the Shared Services recently configured crawls web parts to suit your requirements

Search Scope can implement a custom property

Search result removal clears items from the index immediately and prevents explicit results being displayed

Search needs monitoring and management !!!!!!

Index will only do 16mb of a file

.one and .vsd files are not crawled by default and need additional iFilters

Beware of choosing stop / start services from Central Admin - this will clear the index and require a new full crawl

I've just completed a migration from SharePoint Portal Server 2003 to shiny new Moss 2007 implementation. And whilst looking for some content that had gone missing, I noticed that the search results page sometimes took 30 - 60 seconds to return the next page in the result set, whilst on other occasions it came back very quickly. My first thought was perhaps it's busy, all those users making lots of use of it! But no, processor usage on the boxes was all negligible.

As I explored this some more I discovered that it was consistently inconsistent! By which I mean that the first page of a particular query always came back quickly, the second slow, the third and fourth quickly, then the fifth slow and so on.  I think that's a quick step ( - I've been subjected to too much strictly come dancing), anyhow some digging around eventually showed up the following message in the logs:

 12/08/2008 22:32:19.57  w3wp.exe (0x1134)                        0x0EC4 Search Server Common           MS Search Query                0 High     Exception while finishing web request or starting web page read on http://search.live.com/results.aspx?q=safety&count=3&first=1&mkt=en-GB&format=rss&FORM=SHAREF: System.Net.WebException: Unable to connect to the remote server ---> System.Net.Sockets.SocketException: An existing connection was forcibly closed by the remote host 194.217.240.73:80     at System.Net.Sockets.Socket.EndConnect(IAsyncResult asyncResult)     at System.Net.ServicePoint.ConnectSocketInternal(Boolean connectFailure, Socket s4, Socket s6, Socket& socket, IPAddress& address, ConnectSocketState state, IAsyncResult asyncResult, Int32 timeout, Exception& exception)     --- End of inner exception stack trace ---     at System.Net.HttpWebRequest.EndGetResponse(IAsyncResult asyncResult)     at Microsoft.Office.Server.Search.... 
12/08/2008 22:32:19.57* w3wp.exe (0x1134)                        0x0EC4 Search Server Common           MS Search Query                0 High     ...Federation.HttpAsync.RespCallback(IAsyncResult asynchronousResult) 

and

12/08/2008 22:27:35.20  w3wp.exe (0x1134)                        0x0EC4 Search Server Common           MS Search Query                0 High     Exception while finishing web request or starting web page read on http://search.live.com/QSOnly.aspx?q=safety&count=3&first=1&mkt=en-GB&FORM=SHARES&format=rss: System.Net.WebException: Unable to connect to the remote server ---> System.Net.Sockets.SocketException: An existing connection was forcibly closed by the remote host 194.217.240.71:80     at System.Net.Sockets.Socket.EndConnect(IAsyncResult asyncResult)     at System.Net.ServicePoint.ConnectSocketInternal(Boolean connectFailure, Socket s4, Socket s6, Socket& socket, IPAddress& address, ConnectSocketState state, IAsyncResult asyncResult, Int32 timeout, Exception& exception)     --- End of inner exception stack trace ---     at System.Net.HttpWebRequest.EndGetResponse(IAsyncResult asyncResult)     at Microsoft.Office.Server.Search.F... 
12/08/2008 22:27:35.20* w3wp.exe (0x1134)                        0x0EC4 Search Server Common           MS Search Query                0 High     ...ederation.HttpAsync.RespCallback(IAsyncResult asynchronousResult) 

I thought it a bit strange that a federated search was being performed as there were no federated search webparts on the results page I was looking at. Anyhow it seems that by default the federated searches at Microsoft's live.com are run anyway... disabling these federated search locations in Search Administration > Federated Locations instantly gave me nice quick results all the time.  Well disabling - I added a prefix that's unlikely to get used as I thought they might come in useful when Microsoft has fixed the delay!

If you find another solution - please add a comment to let me know. Thanks.

A quick link to Joel who has posted a good article on thoughts for the future - how we should look at development.

Funnily, this sits well with some of things we are starting to do - using xsl, in-built (or sometimes custom) web services to provide the interfaces to provide functinality rather than dll based web parts