New Sites, New Widgets

Rottnest Island Authority Re-launch

The second-last site to be launched on Tourism WA's fully branded, MOSS-based site provisioning platform went live last Thursday; I reckon it’s one of the best looking sites they've launched to date (the Rottnest Island photography helps, of course). Check it out: http://www.rottnestisland.com

[Update 22 July: As mentioned in my profile to the right, I'd like to clarify the fact the new rottnestisland.com web site is provided by Tourism Western Australia under the Tourism eMarketplace program; although I was involved in the technical construction of the web site as a contractor working for Tourism Western Australia, Mediawhole and mediawhole.com were NOT involved in the launch of this web site. Whereas I previously used the terms "we" and "our" in this post, I was referring to Tourism WA and teams working with the Rottnest Island Authority.]

Booking Exchange

On the subject of all things new, the new online booking capability has also launched on westernaustralia.com. The system integrates with our existing search function and provides live availability information from V3’s Open Booking Exchange. The politics around this apparently simple change were massive but the technology side was relatively straightforward by comparison (web service calls from within SQL Server are as complex as this got from our end). If you’re a tourism operator, find out more.

Travel Planner

The online travel planner was also finally launched after nearly a year of work with a Sydney-based agency. Luke was our man on the ground with this one and he did a great job integrating drop after drop of this widget.

The travel planner “helps visitors collect, organise and share their WA travel itineraries.” You can sign up from the westernaustralia.com homepage and add items from across the site to your travel wallet.

SharePoint SP2 Upgrade Fails: The B2B upgrader timer job failed

Update: Be sure to checkout the comments for additional suggestions.

Upgrading to WSS SP2 from a relatively clean, MOSS 2007 SP1 + December Cumulative Updates environment went smoothly over the weekend but upgrading my day-to-day “MOSS 2007 SP1 + a selection of hot fixes” dev environment to WSS SP2 failed at step 8 of the configuration wizard with:

An exception of type Microsoft.SharePoint.PostSetupConfiguration.PostSetupConfigurationTaskException was thrown.  Additional exception information: Failed to upgrade SharePoint Products and Technologies.

Naturally, it’s not like the configuration wizard would tell me this without forcing me into the log file; no, it assumes I’m a sweet, niaive administrator with  a penchant for colourful UIs and lollypops. Even the event log simply points to the wizard log file. God forbid it present the underlying exception in the wizard UI—I’m guessing anyone dealing with SharePoint on a daily basis isn’t going to freak out when faced with a stack trace. Anyway, into the logs and search for capital ERR and there I find the source of the failure—or at least as close as I’m going to get:

The B2B upgrader timer job failed

I tried all the usual wizard tricks to no avail:

• psconfig -cmd upgrade -inplace b2b -force (failed at step 3 with the same exception but apparently the log file is more detailed)
  
• Followed up my WSS install with the MOSS install
• Browsed through KB944267
• Restarted and stopped the administration service, the timer service, IIS
  
• Cleared the file system cache as described in KB939308 

In the end I'm a complete gimp: after backing up my VM before starting this exercise, I inadvertently fired up an older copy to which I attempted my SP2 install. Moving across to my current SP1+ VM allowed me to successfully install SP2. What gives? Service packs are cumulative so I should have also been successful with my older copy, which was pre-SP1; in fact I should be able to go RTM to SP2.

Despite being a gimp, I learned a few very important lessons today:

• Always, always, always test a service pack or updates release on a non-production, non-critical environment (and backup your content database and other bits before you start in production)
• It's fun to be first but if you're risk averse, it's probably a good idea to let others go first and blog their workarounds before diving in (there's a dearth of information about the problem I encountered as it applies to SP2 and none of the SP1 suggestions from a year ago worked in my environment)
• The SharePoint Products and Technologies Configuration Wizard doesn't log much of any value

SPSite vs SPWeb, Site Collection vs Site

Moving from the (generally) well-named, well-structured, and well-documented ASP.NET world to SharePoint is daunting on many levels and the terminology differences as you drill down into SharePoint can be confusing. Quite often the SharePoint UI will label a concept one way while the API refers to the same concept with an entirely different term. Unfortunately a lot of this stems from the v2 to v3 transition.

Cory Roth has started putting together a list of these differences but if you’re just starting out there are two very important items worth highlighting:

UI Term	API Class Name
Site Collection	SPSite
Site	SPWeb

My own personal trick to remember this is “a site contains webs”… and really MS, WTF is a web if it’s not the web?!?

Dirty Words (Michael Hanes) - blog.mediawhole.com mailto:info@mediawole.com 

 

WSS 3.0 vs MOSS 2007

The Microsoft WSS/MOSS product comparison table can be found here:

http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepointtechnology/FX101758691033.aspx

WSS doesn't include the features listed here:

http://dotnetaddict.dotnetdevelopersjournal.com/moss_vs_wss.htm

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Custom-Built Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 Branded Sites and Webpart Development - info@mediawole.com