Office 2003 and Sharepoint Portal 2003 server support ends at 8th of April.

30/10/2013 Leave a comment

Are you ready ?

In 2002 Microsoft introduced its Support Lifecycle policy based on customer feedback to have more transparency and predictability of support for Microsoft products. As per this policy, Microsoft Business and Developer products, including Windows and Office products, receive a minimum of 10 years of support (5 years Mainstream Support and 5 years Extended Support), at the supported service pack level.

Thus, Windows XP SP3 and Office 2003 will go out of support on April 8, 2014. If your organization has not started the migration to a modern desktop, you are late. Based on historical customer deployment data, the average enterprise deployment can take 18 to 32 months from business case through full deployment. To ensure you remain on supported versions of Windows and Office, you should begin your planning and application testing immediately to ensure you deploy before end of support.

For more information:
http://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/windows/endofsupport.aspx

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SharePoint 2013 Workflows – Requirements

28/10/2013 Leave a comment

If you are interested in SharePoint 2013 Workflows. I can say SharePoint 2013 workflows has never been powerful as before. Which is come us with a tremendous improvement and completely new architecture. As every new System and new architecture brings new problems as always been , thats the nature of the new releases , so before going into dark side , you have to sure that you have working with last updates.

For the overview of SharePoint 2013 Workflows you can find more info from MSDN:

Workflow Manager 1.0:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windowsazure/jj193528(v=azure.10).aspx

Windows Workflow Foundation:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/vstudio/jj684582.aspx

I would like to share some important upgrade and suggestions that may prevent your pains when you try to adapting the new SharePoint 2013 workflows.

First thing is the prerequisites ;

-> Bold Lines extra requirements and fixes many issues

*Workflow Manager 1.0 RTM (Shipped with SP2013 RTM)
*Workflow Manager 1.0 Service Pack 1
*Workflow Manager 1.0 Client for SharePoint 2013 Servers .
(If you installing Workflow Manager 1.0 via Web Platform installer it is automattically installs if your machine already installed SharePoint 2013)

*Service Bus 1.0
*Service Bus 1.0 Service Pack 1

I would suggest to use Web Platform Installer for install and setup and tracking for new upgrades for Workflow Manager and Service Bus.

*SharePoint 2013
*SharePoint 2013 and at least March PU update.
http://www.andrewconnell.com/blog/Workflow-Improvements-Changes-SP2013-March-PU-and-RTM-Developer-Tools
*I have suggested that Install Latest Current CU (Currently October 2013 CU for SharePoint 2013)

 *.Net FrameWork 4.5 (It is also SharePoint 2013 prerequisites)
*Always check the .Net FrameWork 4.5 Hotfixes.

For Developers :

*Visual Studio 2012 with latest Upgrade
*Office Developer tools for Visual Studio 2012 RTM (Again use Web Platform Installer for tracing new updates)
*Worflow Manager Tools 1.0 for VS 2012 (If you installing Workflow Manager 1.0 via Web Platform installer it is automattically installs if your machine already installed VS2012)

 

Here Some other Suggestions;

* When after you register your workflow service as below command:

Register-SPWorkflowService -SPSite “http://blog.bugrapostaci.com” -WorkflowHostUri “http://workflow.bugrapostaci.com:12291” -Scope “Workflows” -AllowOAuthHttp
Make sure that you are using -WorkflowHostUri as full FQDN name , otherwise you may face some funcy Access denied issues.

*When you are using developing or testing don’t use System account. You may face also some System.Unauthorize exceptions which is also described technet it is not supported.

*Sometimes when you are working with Visual Studio you may face your latest build doesn’t deployed to the farm. That is a VS Caching problem. Always use latest VS bits. (Restarting VS or killing vshost exe can fixes that issue on next deployment)

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About October CU 2013 for SharePoint 2010 server build version

28/10/2013 Leave a comment

In official documentation (October2013 CU for SharePoint Server 2010 – KB 2825786) states that the Oct CU for SP2010 has the build number 14.0.7110.5000. However, after installing the CU and checking the Central Administration you can see the Configuration database version: 14.0.7108.5000.

The reason for this discrepancy is that mostly only the Search DLLs have the higher (14.0.7110.5000) version number: both Microsoft.SharePoint.dll and the CA portal show 14.0.7108.5000. so in case you see this in your environment

– there is nothing wrong here.

(Thanks to Piotrek)

 

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SharePoint 2013 October 2013 CU

28/10/2013 Leave a comment

SharePoint 2013 October 2013 CU has been released;

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/joerg_sinemus/archive/2013/10/10/sharepoint-2013-october-2013-cu.aspx

 Be aware that all Updates for SharePoint 2013 require March 2013 PU for SharePoint 2013 to be installed first.

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How to ensure the SharePoint 2010 workflows end in given period

28/10/2013 Leave a comment

Many question has been asked about this problem.

in SharePoint Best Practices;

* For performance consideration ; you have to plan your timer jobs will always finish on time.
* You need to choose appropriate schedule interval to do it.

But this is not suitable for every condition ; Let me give some information about the issue.

You have planing to develop a custom timer job  for example this job has responsible to get some remote data from a remote System in 1 minute interval .
And what if the remote operation has taken more than 60sec. or what if that the timer job has faced with some problems and not getting finished itsjob in given period. You got the idea 🙂

In some conditions ; you may need to ensure no matter what ,the timer job has to be finished its job in given period . and If doesnt , you may want to terminate the running instance of the timer job and start a new instance of it.

The problem is here ;

If a timer has over its period and continue to running ; After the period has elapsed the new instance wont be started by  default behaviour of the SharePoint.
In SharePoint there is no way to run  two instance of a same timer job definition at same time

And even you have implemented some control logic in that timer job which responsible for the check and terminate if previous instance has running to stop it. It doesnt work because the timer job code wont be run again so it is never step through the SPTimerJob.Execute() method one more time.

And there is no way in OOB configuration to provide this functionality.

Resolution;

Resolution of this problem is easy but tricky. First you need to have 2 timer job.

EnsureTimerJobFinished

1)  Controler Timer job: (Scheduled) Has responsible to run worker timer job in defined interval and responsible to timing. (if the worker timer job has still running it can kill the previous one and start a new instance)

2)  Worker Timer Job. (Once) : Does the execute actual operation.

3)  If the Controler has detected that the previous instance of the worker timer job still running. It can terminate it. (Or you can extend your solution and make your own decision here)

4) After termination , The Controller can run another instance of the worker timer job.

Filed under Sharepoint 2010, SharePoint 2013 Tagged with , , , ,