Lost!

SharePoint, now known as Microsoft Office Sharepoint Server (MOSS) has gone gold this week. The main Sharepoint websites are popping with info on MOSS, but who’s going to buy this software right off the shelf? I for one make it a rule of thumb to wait at least 6 months before buying new software - a year for OS’s. Its like buying a car - you never buy the first year model…

If you want to buy a copy though, you have to go through the new way of licensing that Microsoft has setup - all 9 versions. I really don’t know why they’ve decided to do this with their OS’s and software. Why would I want to buy a neutered copy of an Enterprise Portal System? Of course, it’s no longer “portal” software - its an Office add on…

SharePoint is complicated enough - why in the world did Microsoft create 9 licensing types? I mean good grief, as a Knowledge Base Administrator, I can go from one SharePoint portal to another and other than the standard changes. Now I’ve got to worry about which features are missing because of X license… Why don’t we just make it self billing? You put a check box in which features you want and customize it - kind of like building a Dell…. (please tell me you can read the sarcasm here)

Some new benefits include blogging and wiki templates as well. Other than that, I haven’t read anything too special about it. Guess I need to go ahead and install it.

OH! and FrontPage isn’t FrontPage anymore. Depending on who you are, its either Office SharePoint designer or something else (I’m too lazy to find the name.) Microsoft is REALLY pushing the Office and SharePoint brands across the board. Before too long, we’ll start seeing more pushing for Vista Enterprise or something like that. Then again, the Vista Activation Service has shown up online…

Ever go to a SharePoint website, maybe your own, and noticed that you could just about get a cup of coffee while SharePoint sits there thinking about what to do when you click on a link? Ever wonder why it does this?

Well, when you’re on a SharePoint/IIS server that isn’t used as much as it would like, it shuts down the IIS worker processes. This means that whenever you click a link on an idle server, it literally has to open up an instance of an IIS worker process to serve your page. Wanna fix this behavior?

On your portal server (either Physically or Remotely logged in) go to the IIS Manager
Open the Application Pools on the left hand side.
Right click on the DefaultAppPool and go to properties
Click the Performance Tab
Uncheck “shutdown worker processes after being idle”

*POOF* - fixed…

Now, I must mention that your web server is set by default to turn this stuff off after 20 minutes. If you’re running a SharePoint portal and its doing this, you might want to update your content, grab a few more users, etc.

This fix may cause other problems as well, like memory issues if you get slammed and it can’t close the worker processes - so be careful.

I don’t know when they started doing this, but Google has placed warnings to certain websites. This may be an IE only type of feature as well…

Warning - visiting this web site may harm your computer!
You can learn more about harmful web content and how to protect your computer at StopBadware.org.

Advisory provided by [Google Logo]

It’s interesting and helpful that Google is doing this…

My wife is one of those people that hates watching the news because, mainly, it’s all bad news. But, in an interesting twist, I’ve found that bad news sells on the internet as well.

I’ve done several stories over the past year and, by far, my biggest referrer is bad news. I’ve written about eBay and RAC and those stories by themselves have more referrals and links back than the recent Krugle story I ran. The reason I’m puzzled is because the Krugle information is new, no one has the same information about the company at this time. I’m not crying about it, just think its weird. Continue reading…

I’ve detailed many times that I don’t like to throw away older computers. My wife has even gone so far as to ban me from dumpster diving if I see something I can use… I’ve also had to make an agreement to get rid of 2 computers within the next year so I can get a new (as in the new car smell) computer. Since that agreement, I’ve acquired my brand new computer and adopted another one from a dumpster. I technically haven’t lied because I plan on getting rid of 2-3 computers in the next year to replace them with 1 Enterprise server… Continue reading…