My Experiences with SBS 2003 and SharePoint 2003 (WSS 2.0)
Last Updated 1/26/2004 6:20:00 PM
Overview
For the last few (eight) months I have been experimenting with SBS 2003 and SharePoint Services 2003 (WSS v2.0). I have finally reached a point where I would like to share some of my experiences with everyone.
Basically there are a few drivers for my configuration.
- Collaboration
- Email aggregation
- Hosting for my digital images
- Ease of maintenance
- Maximizing current resources
- Mobile Access (Kiosk, Handheld, Work etc...)
Requirements
What software do I need to accomplish this configuration?
Current Issues
Currently I am in the process of transferring all my data from one server to another. This is due to a slight mishap with the NNTP connector; it basically synced all the news groups with my news provider with the public server store. Now I have many folders that I am not able to delete. (Any thoughts would be appreciated.)
Configuration
Now for the fun stuff. I have been requested to provide some sort of graphical representation of what my configuration looks like. So excuse the lack of creativity when it comes to diagrams.
- All users access my domain which is registered with www.networksolutions.com. Here I have a CNAME which points to www.dyndns.org which hosts an address that my netgear router automatically updates. There are other options to this as well.
- My home pc is part of a workgroup, mainly due to the fact that I constantly rebuild it and I don't want to reconfigure my domain again.
- Virtualization is king! I can now host all my machines without having to worry about the underlying OS. In the event I need to rebuild my machine, I just unplug the firewire drive that hosts my virtual machine and move it to my other machine.
- Exchange 2003 is great since I use Outlook Web Access to access my mail from anywhere. Additionally I use the SMTP connector to aggregate all my mail.
- MrPostman allows me to access my hotmail and yahoo accounts as if they were a pop server.
- I use Intravnews as my RSS feed aggregator (http://www.intravnews.com/). The only drawback is that it requires your Outlook client to be running. A good server agent would be useful here.
- Finally, I have an account with www.smugmug.com to host all my digital photos. They have no limit on space and the bandwith they provide is good. I am also using the service as a backup to my local storage. Individual image size is limited to eight MB.
SBS Server
I will not go over too much detail of the configuration of SBS 2003. The installation is straight forward. I do recommend that you use the domain.local for your internal domain name vs. using your internet domain, i.e. mydomain.com.
Exchange
Exarcfg.exe -e -s:MyServer.Myhome.Local
- The pop3 server service is disabled by default. You will need to enable using compmgmt.msc
- If you want to use ssl for your smtp and pop connections, export the certificate created in IIS and import it in the pop and smtp connectors.
- Download the 1.0.3 beta of MrPostman. This version runs as a service.
- Modify your web.config file for OMA, c:\program files\ if you plan on using this on you cell phone, with Sharepoint installed
<httpHandlers>
<clear />
<add verb="*" path="*.aspx" type="System.Web.UI.PageHandlerFactory, System.Web, Version=1.0.5000.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b03f5f7f11d50a3a" />
httpHandlers>
<httpModules>
<add name="Session" type="System.Web.SessionState.SessionStateModule"/>
httpModules>
<pages enableSessionState="true" enableViewState="true" enableViewStateMac="true" validateRequest="false" />
<trust level="Full" originUrl="" />
- One of the things that I wanted to do with my server is to provide email with my Mobile device. I played around breifly with the auto activesync and that seemed to work like a charm. Unfortunately I didn't keep the AudioVox SMT 5600 for long and have since purchased a Palm Treo 650. (I originally owned a Treo 600). Nothing wrong with the Audiovox except it didn't have a keyboard.
So the major issue that I ran into with the configuration is Mail Routing. I finally figured out what I needed to do differently and it is outlined in the following Microsoft KB article. Actually quite simple.
So for everyone who is interested, I have used the above SMTP address rewrite tool to have all email appear to be sent from my hotmail account. I know that you may think this is not ideal but let me give you the reasons. I use the free service from hotmail to automatically send me an SMS message on mail arrival. Unfortunately, the Treo 650 doesn't support the Exchange 2003 SMS message to activate activesync.
The main problem with this approach is that the OWA url is constructed from your default SMTP email address i.e. username@hotmail.com gives you a url of https://domain.com/exchange/username. The problem is that in Exchange 2003 any domain other than the one listed in the “Default Recipient Policy“ will utilize the url of https://domain.com/exchange/username@hotmail.com.
Now VersaMail doesn't like this. So to make a long story short, I changed the default recipient policy to @hotmail.com as the default SMTP address. Added the smarthost of my ISP as in the afore mentioned KB article, and behold, everything is working!
IIS
- Register a certificate for your installation. (Wildcards are really cool!, I got this tip from another site, I will post the link later)
selfssl /t /n:CN=*.mydomain.com /v:730
- Create additional CNAMEs with your DNS provider to point users to different websites using hostheader redirection to redirect users to various parts of your sharepoint site. Use the following asp page to do the redirection.
Default.asp for CNAME public.mydomain.com:
<html>
<head>
<meta name="GENERATOR" Content="Microsoft Visual Studio .NET 7.1">
head>
<body>
Response.Redirect(http://www.mydomain.com/sites/mysite)
%>
body>
html>
SharePoint
Well to put the icing on the cake I decided that I would like to use Sharepoint for my web site. This is a free add-on that you can download from Microsoft.
http://www.microsoft.com/sharepoint
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=918f8c18-89dc-4b47-82ca-34b393ea70e1&displaylang=en
The main reasons for choosing Sharepoint is for its collaboration features. I think the biggest issue with most people is that they have bits and pieces of information all over the place. Sharepoint allows you to collect all that information and have it in one place. How many of you are in a relationship where the significant other is still using a calendar on the refrigerator? I don't know about you but refrigerators are about keeping things cold, not about collaboration, unless however it is about making dinner.
Well I don't know where to start. I have figured out many things on the way to writing all this down.
How does it work?
I think this is one of the big questions. It took me awhile to realize all the pitfalls of how it all works, but I think I have an idea of something that is maintainable.
Basically, Sharepoint services 2003 (WSS 2.0) is an ISAPI filter that sits on a website. This filter redirects you to the Web Storage System (WSS) that is hosted by WMSDE or SQLServer. (WMSDE is a special version of MSDE that doesn't have a size limit. It however imposes restrictions on schema so you can't use it for anything else.)
There are at least two databases. One stores the content and one stores the configuration. In SQL Enterprise Manager you can see the defaults for WSS is STS_Config and STS_{server}_{number} for the database names. Sharepoint portal services creates SPS_Config_db as the configuration default and three content databases.
Everything in Sharepoint is accessible as a Web Folder, native support is included with Windows XP and higher. Frontpage 2003 is obviously the editor of choice as it tightly integrates with the Webpart architecture.
Webparts can be considered as Sharepoint's extensibility mechanism. These fully functional portlets provide some sort of intelligence to your site.
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=D5BD33CB-4A0C-45C6-9BD3-091470DB7943&displaylang=en
Issues:
How many issues have I gone through, I can not begin to count. But it seems that the leaning curve is nearly over.
- MSN Weather doesn't save preferences. It would repeatedly give me the error "Properties cannot be retrieved at this time". The solution to this problem was simple, with only nominal hair loss. If you need to change the IPAddress of the website, you will need to remove and re-extend the website in the Sharepoint admin console. Somehow the webpart forgets how to access it's preferences if this changes.
- In my design I only have one physical IPAddress that is accessible from the outside. This is normally not a problem, but a problem when you want to use SSL on all your sites. My solution to this issue is to only have one site under Sharepoint control. I have manually created the database, to a name that I like, i.e. MyHome, and created only secondary websites to hold only a redirect.asp file, i.e.
http://private.mydomain.com redirects to https://www.mydomain.com/sites/privatesite
http://public.mydomain.com redirects to http://www.mydomain.com/sites/publicsite
The main benefit of this is that I now only have one content database to manage instead of three. Additionally, all my sites can use SSL. As for the public site I choose to leave it normal as people would get an SSL certificate warning.
- I tried my best to get portal and WSS to work on the same machine, in a manner that is maintainable. But alas this is not to be. I will be pursuing this a bit further in the future. For now it looks like I may open up another port on my Netgear router, i.e. port 81 and port forward it to another virtual server.
- The biggest issue with Portal Server is the fact that after installing the software, I could not create the configuration database. After much cursing I ended up installing another instance of WMSDE for Portal Server only. For now however I am not going to use it. Additionally you will need to configure the ApplicationPool with a domain account that has sufficient rights to the database beforehand. The website and the CentralAdminPool seem to need to run under the same account. This is another thing I will be looking into in the future.
- Sharepoint and OMA, OWA. See the section above on OMA. This is something that you have to do to make it work. Additionally, in the Sharepoint admin tool, you will have to configure the managed paths to exclude; owa, oma, exchweb, public, and exchange.
- I finally have the public folder working with Sharepoint. Aparently I have overlooked the Page Viewer Web part!!!
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/sppt/reskit/c4161881x.mspx
You need to set the url to https://www.mydomain.com/public/familyevents/?cmd=contents&view=weekly (monthly also works!)
I will keep posting update on specifics of configuration to this article. Stay tuned...=)
Alex