Thursday, December 28, 2006

How to Change a Server Name Post-Deployment in MOSS 2007 & WSS 3.0

A new and really cool feature in MOSS 2007 and WSS 3.0 that my team here at Vorsite and I are very happy about is that now you can quickly and easily change the name of a server running MOSS or WSS 3.0 after installation has taken place and site collections have been created. Before with SPS 2003 it was a near impossible challenge but now in MOSS you can use a nifty stsadm.exe command to do most of the heavy lifting.

Here are the steps to do this in MOSS 2007 or WSS 3.0:

First: Change each alternate access mapping for your MOSS/WSS deployment in Central Administration
  1. Open Central Administration
     
  2. Click on the “Operations” Tab
     
  3. Click on the “Alternate access mappings” link under the “Global Configuration” heading
     
  4. Modify each mapping item to reflect your newly chosen server name, making sure to keep port numbers the same (this also include the mapping for Central Administration, don’t worry it's cool)
     
Second: Use stsadm.exe to invoke the “renameserver” command option
  1. Open a command prompt window and navigate to the folder where stsadm.exe sits. Normally “C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\12\BIN”.
     
  2. Use the renameserver command as follows, replacing <newname> and <oldname> with the new and old names of your server:

    stsadm -o renameserver -newservername <newname> -oldservername <oldname>

Third: Rename your Server via Change Name Operation in Windows Server 2003
  1. Now the last step is to simply right click on My Computer
  2. Open “Properties”
  3. Click on “Computer Name” tab
  4. Click “Change” button
  5. Input your new server name and reboot the server
Now your server is renamed and all MOSS/WSS web applications and site collections should work perfectly fine.

posted by Jonathon J. Frost at 6:49 PM 83 Comments Links to this post

Tuesday, December 26, 2006

Opening Document Library Items in MOSS 2007 in a New Window

One issue that came up during a recent project was how to open items sitting in document libraries in Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007 in a new window. I had found various neat ways on how to do this in SharePoint Portal Server (SPS) 2003, including Todd Bleeker’s awesome Content Editor Web Part solution which entails adding a normal content editor web part with some slick JavaScript to a doc lib page that where upon the page loading most “A” tags on the page are modified to open in a new window.

This web part solution is great, and even works in MOSS 2007 interestingly, but my customer on this project was looking for an even easier solution that did not involve having to manually touch each document library at some point. After some further searching I found the steps to modify site definition files to change the inherit behavior of document libraries so that each time one is created it will automatically have this “new window opening” behavior. Andrew Connell had a great blog post on this.

All of this info was helpful, however the problem of course is that the site definition structure in MOSS 2007 is quite different from SPS 2003 and so the steps to make these granular modifications have changed. After some tinkering around I finally figured it out (or so it seems, the behavior seems expected so far, no weirdness has yet emerged!).

Steps to modify the site definition files in MOSS 2007 to open document library items in a new window:

1. Open the folder: C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\12\TEMPLATE\GLOBAL\XML

Apparently there is now a “global” folder for site definition files, I am still trying to understand the mapping of things from SPS 2003 and MOSS 2007.

2. Find and open the file named “ONET.XML” in your favorite XML/text editor (good old notepad for me please)

3. On line 693 you will find this line of XML:

<Else><HTML><![CDATA[<A onfocus="OnLink(this)" HREF="]]></HTML>

Changing this line to as shown below will change the behavior of the textual links to open in a new window

<Else><HTML><![CDATA[<A onfocus="OnLink(this)" target="_new" HREF="]]></HTML>

4. On line 838 you will find this similar line of XML:

<Else><HTML><![CDATA[<A TABINDEX=-1 HREF="]]></HTML>

Changing this line to as shown below will change the behavior of the image icon links to open in a new window

<Else><HTML><![CDATA[<A TABINDEX=-1 target="_new" HREF="]]></HTML>

5. Save changes do an IISRESET and you should be good to go. Of course if you are in a medium or large farm scenario you will need to perform these steps for each front-end web server

posted by Jonathon J. Frost at 4:53 PM 64 Comments Links to this post

Monday, December 25, 2006

Wow, my first post!

Well here we go, no turning back now ;-) I have been meaning to do this blog thing for forever now and I think I have simply run out of excuses. So here we go, blog post nummer Eins! I hope that in due time I can fill these pages with all of the crazy stuff on SharePoint and travel that have been floating around in my head the last few months! And also free up space on my dry erase board at work by putting my random notes on SPS and MOSS down on blog space!

posted by Jonathon J. Frost at 2:19 AM 4 Comments Links to this post