Sharepoint 2003 External Connector License

We found our answer to our Sharepoint License issue.  Stay with Sharepoint 2003 version, much cheaper!  We got a quote for the Sharepoint 2007 External Connector License for about $30,000.  Compare this to the 2003 license for $2,000!  Since we don’t need any of the new features that MOSS offers we will happily stay with the cheap alternative.  Here is a quote from a repable site about the license.

“External Connector License. An External Connector License allows an unlimited number of authenticated external users to access a server. If the number of user accounts will approach or exceed 20, the External Connector License is the most economic choice. Although there may not be 20 external users when the solution is initially implemented, consider planned usage of the technology over time before selecting the licensing type for your organization. The estimated retail price of the External Connector License is $1,999.”

Keep your Report Server in Native Mode!

Do not use the Report Server add-in for SharePoint. There is no need to use it, it has only given me a headache. All you need to do when you are running the Reporting Services Configuration Tool is to add the Reports and ReportServer Virtual Directories to the SharePoint site. I know, this seems too simple right, well it works. Please keep in mind that i am using SSL and i have not tried this otherwise. When I first started research this I came across the Reporting Services Add-In for SharePoint tutorial from here. It says to setup the Report Server on the default web site in IIS under a different port. Well this didn’t work for me so I read up and others told me to create a new sub site named something like reports. So I made reports.ourwebsite.com and SharePoint was on portal.ourwebsite.com. So now I install the add-in and I think everything is good. Then we moved our web server to a different box that was not a domain controller. Well this made problems because we had the site setup for windows authentication. While on the domain controller the website only asked for the username and password, now that IIS is on a separate box it asks for the domain\username and password. That won’t work because our customers will not know the domain name. So I moved us to Basic Authentication. The issue with this is the Report Server Add-In for SharePoint will not work with Basic Authentication. Now I am stuck having to put the Report Server back to Native mode and have our customers click a link from our portal to reports. The issue now is our customers now need to double authenticate, first to portal then to reports! Then I was recommended from a co-worker to try and just add the Report Server application pools to the SharePoint site. So I tried it even though all the documentation I’ve read seemed to completely veer away from that idea. It worked!! I added my link in the page viewer web part and it is flawless. I am able to use basic authentication and have the report integrated into my SharePoint webpage. I am kind of upset because the Microsoft website steered me on the wrong path. Anyway it all worked out and my boss is happy, so I am happy. If you look a couple of posts down you will see a picture of the integrated Report Server in SharePoint, my new setup looks exactly the same as this. If you have any questions at all please leave me a comment and I will defiantly try and help.

- Kevin C -

SharePoint CAL’s (Client Access License)

I now know how Microsoft makes there money. We just upgraded to SharePoint 2007 (MOSS) and we are about to make our site public to our customers. We found that we needed to buy licences to allow our customers use SharePoint.   You can reference this Microsoft page for more information about this: http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepointserver/HA101655351033.aspx.

We found that it will cost about $90 for a standard use of SharePoint and about $70 extra to use the Enterprise Edition (new features from MOSS). That is about $160 per customer! There is one more option which is called an Internet Licence. This allows anyone to use your site, no separate CAL’s required. Sounds too good to be true? It costs $40,000! We have about 40 customers so I don’t think that it would be worth that. I love SharePoint but I am starting to see why open source got popular.

- Kevin C -

Reporting Service add-in for Sharepoint 3.0 & MOSS 2007

I’ve had a couple requests to see how the reporting service add-in for SharePoint looks like on my site. My purpose of merging the two is to allow our customers to view there current and past bug reports they had submitted to our company. I built a report to show the status of there ticket and all the notes that have been recorded on the ticket. The database that the report is quarrying is SQL and the bug tracking system we are using is TestTrack Pro. We had to convert the TestTrack Pro database to SQL from its Native database to allow for reporting. The reporting service add-in allows you to upload a report to any document library. The permissions for that report are managed by whatever permissions you define in SharePoint. Please note that the user must have sufficient permissions in the SQL database you are quarrying to allow for report viewing. The add-in also comes with a report web part which allows you to define perimeters. In my case i used the company name to allow the one report with all of our customers to be narrowed down to the specific company for report viewing on there site specific web page. If you have any questions please leave a comment.

- Kevin C -

Delete Orphaned Sites in SharePoint

So I ran into an issue the other day with deleting a SharePoint site. I needed to delete a site and re-create it because of our migration. To do this I went to Site Setting on the specific site and deleted it from the web browser. I have done this before with this site because I needed to practice the migration, no issues before. This time although the server was moving slow, and because of this it just continued to try and delete the site with no confirmation page that it was successful. The page was gone so I thought all was well. This was until I saw errors coming from the server logs relating to the page I had deleted! I looked in the Central Administration page to check the site list, the site was still there! I clicked to delete the site from the Central Administration page but it would not work, no option to delete. I then tried to delete the site with STSADM.EXE but I got this error with both stsadm.exe -o deletesite and stsadm.exe -o deleteweb: The system cannot find the path specified. (Exception from HRESULT: 0×80070003). I searched this error on the internet and found a solution which did finally work.

Go here for the Microsoft solution: http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;918744

I did the following.

Step 1: I opened a Command Prompt and went to this directory: C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\12\BIN

I typed in the following to list the orphaned sites:
stsadm -o databaserepair -url http://URLofWindowsSharePointServicesSite -databasename DatabaseName

I then typed the following to delete the orphaned sites:
stsadm -o databaserepair -url http://URLofWindowsSharePointServicesSite -databasename DatabaseName -deletecorruption

This didn’t harm anything but didn’t seem to do anything either. Since I did preform this step I cannot say it didn’t help and I can’t say it did, so i would do it just in case.

Step 2: This was the final step that did fix the issue. Remove and then reattach the content databases on the virtual server. I am quoting this from Microsoft:

1. Click Start, click Administrative Tools, and then click SharePoint Central Administration.

2. Under Virtual Server Configuration on the Windows SharePoint Services Central Administration page, click Configure virtual server settings.

3. Click the virtual server that you want to configure, and then click Manage content databases under Virtual Server Management on the Virtual Server Settings page.

4. On the Manage Content Databases page, click the content database that you want to remove.

5. On the Manage Content Database Settings page, note the following settings:
• The database server
• The database name
• The database capacity settings

6. Click to select the Remove content database check box, and then click OK. When you are prompted to confirm that you want to remove the content database, click OK.

7. Click OK.

8. On the Manage Content Databases page, click Add a content database.

9. On the Add a Content Database page, specify the database server, the database name, and the database capacity settings. Then, click OK.

I hope this helps. It worked for me. The sites were gone completely and I was able to create the new site with the old name.

- Kevin C -