Microsoft on Matt Thornton

Guide: MOSS 2007 Multiple site collections on Port 80

Thu, 09 Dec 2010 13:39:03 +0000

Requirement: multiple site collections on port 80 on unique URLs in SharePoint 2007, e.g,. http://democlient1, http://someotherdemo
The scenario: you have one development machine which you use for multiple clients. Because of this, you want to host multiple site collections and allow a unique URL for each, without having to specify the port number in the URL. For example, if your machine name is SPDEV then by default your primary web application will respond on http://spdev. But you also want to have http://democlient1, http://someotherdemo, etc. There are a three ways of doing this. The two common ways are 1) assign unique IP addresses to each web application each responding on port 80, but this can be more complicated to setup and manage at the machine level, or 2) Use a non-standard port number for each web application, but this creates uglier URLs, e.g., http://democlient1:18765, http://someotherdemo:18734 etc.

Solution: It’s possible to achieve the requirement.

Reporting a product bug to Microsoft

Fri, 12 Mar 2010 12:08:14 +0000

I needed to update our installation of SQL Server 2008 to include Integration Services so that maintenance plans would run. I have local admin privilege on the machine, but as with most Microsoft related installation tasks, you routinely get so far through the process and you’re hit with the SeSecurityPrivilege error - that is, you don’t have some permission or other. The installation process goes wrong and you have to cancel out of the whole process in order to restart it with an account that has the privilege.

Workflow error help: failed on start and more

Thu, 16 Jul 2009 16:05:08 +0000

One of the major selling points of SharePoint is the power of workflows. Designing very basic sequential workflows in Sharepoint Designer 2007 is a very straightforward task using the workflow designer wizard. But unfortunately straightforward is the key word here, as you are limited by the functionality available to you in SharePoint Designer. Simple tasks (e.g., update an item, send an email, etc.) are doable, but, for example, you can’t do any string manipulation other than building “dynamic strings”. So even creating a suitable subject line to an email can require a complicated collection of variables and such like. SPD workflows are also very much “single use” - i.e., they start, they run, they finish. They can wait and so on, but complicated business logic is pretty difficult to program. At that point, you’ll need to get involved with Visual Studio. That’s not without its difficulties, however, and as someone coming from a Visual Studio software background, creating workflows can be a minefield. Certain expectations you may have with Winforms just go completely out the window.