‘Best of MMS’ is a one-day synopsis of the week long main event held in Las Vegas in April – see www.2013mms.com/ for the official MSFT site inc. videos keynotes, etc…

This year it’s also just 1-venue whereas last year was 3, however last year was product launch cycle and this year its just iterative improvements.

Microsoft described the event with:

Microsoft recently announced the availability of new solutions to help enterprise and SMB customers manage hybrid cloud services and connected devices with greater agility and cost-efficiency.

System Center 2012 SP1, Windows Server 2012, Windows Azure and Windows Intune are key solutions that deliver against Microsoft’s Cloud OS vision to provide customers & partners with a modern platform to address their top IT challenges.

This 1-day event will provide you with the opportunity to attend the best sessions from MMS 2013. Best of MMS UK 2013 will enable you to interact with our sponsoring & exhibiting partners, and understand the next step forward in Microsoft’s Cloud OS vision, strategy and roadmap, with two tracks for you to choose from:

• Infrastructure, application & cloud management for transforming the datacentre
• Desktop & device management for empowering people-centric IT

Opened by Stuart Leddy, System Center Marketing Manager

A full house of c.200 delegates plus exhibiting partners

Agenda for the day, competitions we won’t win (in-joke..), etc.

Keynote: Cloud Optimize your Business with Microsoft Management Solutions
Cliff Evans, Cloud OS Lead

A summation of what was a 2-hr keynote at MMS (available on YouTube at

“Cloud OS”

“When are we going to get a 48-hr day”

“Used to specialise in 1 or 2 products, now have to specialise in several!”

“Are you running Private Cloud or just have some virtualisation in your Data Center?” – of course, Virtualisation alone is not Private Cloud – agility, metering, utility behaviour is Cloud

Interesting infomercial / profile on Dominos Pizza – runs their entire back-end estate with just 2 sysadmin staff, all Hyper-V managed with System Center suite.

Plugging ”Datacenter without boundaries’ – crossing on-premise, private & public cloud (with Azure of course! ) – doubling storage of Azure every 6-9 months

Windows Server 2012 storage spanning on-premise to Cloud
Storage Spaces – SAN capabilities at a fraction of the cost

Toyota re: Windows Intune and a stat that said %20 of respondents believe BYOD “is a right!” – crikey! some serious device management needed for all those non-domain joined bits of vulnerability

Infrastructure, Application & Cloud Management – “State of the Union”
Julius Davies & Clive Watson

Changes – lower cost, increased capacity e.g. 8-core & 56GB RAM to support higher load workloads such as SQL & SharePoint

Windows Server 2012 released 7 months ago, but only about 1/3 the room evaluating or using the product – and that’s an audience of MS infrastructure folks

Scaling up and out (big servers and big clusters) – up to 64-node clusters, our largest customer Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V Cluster deployment is 6-nodes however that’s just 1 of 4 clusters over 2-sites covering production & DR

Shared Nothing Live Migration – not the best marketing words for VM migration without Shared Storage!

Versioning of VM’s via Replication – can keep previous versions e.g. useful for product life-cycle versioning

Private Cloud with Windows Server 2012 and System Center 2012
Clive Watson & Julius Davies

As Tony mentioned, lots of catch-up technologies e.g. QoS, bandwidth management etc. although quite a few interesting new capabilities too – e.g. Dynamic Access (security with operators – as in Boolean not, Pizza eating

Application and Monitoring for your Private Cloud with System Center 2012
Paul Collins & Gavin Kemp

Portals: Self Service for using Clouds with System Center 2012
Gordon McKenna

Consistent Dev-Ops Experiences through new high-density web sites with elastic scaling, rich IaaS experience for on-premise Private Cloud self-service provisioning that looks like the Azure WebUI (i.e. very very slick) and these VM’s are portable to MS Public Cloud

www.microsoft.com/hosting – Enabling the Cloud O/S for Service Providers

Hearing the Cross-Platform is actually the wrong phrase, as its isn’t – its Seamless-Platform!

A lot of talk of Service almost confusing with Service Center – now who would want to be presenting that!?

Windows Azure – At the Heart of the Hybrid Cloud with PaaS and IaaS
Samuel Solomon

Another compressed session trying to squeeze a day’s session into just 40 minutes, but covered the key features of why Azure is such a compelling platform – some very big numbers with global reach

10 Azure/Office 365 DC’s with 2 new coming on-line (Japan & Australia)
4 trillion objects in Azure Storage
5.5 billion worldwide queries each month
280+ million connected users per month (that’s why they bought Skype
88 markets, 32 languages – Office 365
..and lots in Azure too!

BBC Olympic online coverage was delivered on Azure Media Services

Global Physical Infrastructure

Huge application support beyond vanilla Microsoft workloads

Ask The Datacentre & Cloud Experts
Microsoft & Partner Panel

Prize draws from the day, and OMG I won the star prize a Lenovo Thinkpad 2

I’m on-site in Vietnam with a customer who is starting their SharePoint journey as well the wider journey to becoming a data driven business.  We’ve been running through business and technical discovery sessions for over a week now and something came out of one of the meetings which was begging to have SharePoint step in and save the day.

The business problem

In this furniture design and manufacturing company, the product development team produce CAD drawing of parts and assembled components which then get issued to the production team.  These hardcopy drawings are used to build the components to specification.

What happens from time to time is a breakdown in communication where a drawing gets revised, but the production team don’t get informed quickly enough and items continue to get made from out of date drawings wasting time, money and therefore profit.

The technical solution

What is needed is a solution to easily and quickly bridge the divide between the digital information of a drawing revision and quickly halt the work on a component or product while the correct drawings are found.

The solution was to create a tracking list on SharePoint which the product development team maintain, this defines whether a drawing is valid or invalid. Each row in the list has a unique QR code which gets created and encodes the URL to the display form. This image is then pasted onto the CAD drawing and then printed and issued allowing production staff in instantly validate a drawing as valid or not and with nothing more than a cheap smart phone or their own personal smart phone.

There was one blog post mentioning exactly what was needed but for SharePoint 2007.

Our solution was slightly different to his, mostly due to SharePoint 2010 behaviour –

1. Create a custom list
2. Create a column called QRCodeImage of type Picture/HyperLink, format the URL as a picture
3. Create a workflow that runs when a new item is added performing the following:
   1. Create a Workflow variable called “GoogleChartAPIURL”, type string
   2. Calculate “CurrentItemID” minus 1 (output to variable:calc)
   3. Calculate “Variable:Calc” plus 1 (output to variable: calc1)
   4. Set the variable “GoogleCharAPIURL” to https://chart.googleapis.com/chart?cht=qr&choe=UTF-8&chs=100×100&chl="http://yoursharepointsite/site/list/DispForm.aspx?ID= and add a lookup to the workflow variable “calc1”. This will generate the URL with parameters for your QR code and encode the direct link to the SharePoint list item.
   5. Set “QRCodeImage” field to the “GoogleChartAPIURL” variable.
   6. Save and publish the workflow.

This is what it looks like in a list item -

This solution is pretty widely applicable to most requirements to bridge the physical and digital worlds together such as; Document Tracking, Asset Tracking, or going event further not encoding URL’s at all and encoding Business contacts or other data which is dynamically generated off the list columns by the workflow.

It also has the following benefits:

1. Cheap consumer hardware to do the scanning. Any smartphone will do.
2. Free chart API from Google to convert the list item URL into a QR Code (although the API is officially deprecated it will continue to function until April 20, 2015).
3. Easy to implement on SharePoint.

Once this type of system has proved itself you can easily move onto a more robust approach by stopping using Google’s API by running your own QR code generating web service on site but for most customers this is a quick and reliable way of leveraging this technology in the quickest and cheapest way possible.

There are commercial SharePoint add-on’s that also provide similar functionality too but for my case, they either didn’t have a SP2010 version or relied on SharePoint Standard features. This solution was build on SharePoint Foundation and should work with hosted versions including Office 365… at least until Google pulls the plug on the service in two years.

References

http://blogs.citrius.com/2011/03/01/automatically-create-qr-code-barcodes-for-items-in-a-sharepoint-list-part-1/

http://www.barcodelib.com/asp_net/barcode_symbologies/qrcode.html

http://www.speals.com/products/qrcodeup/default.aspx

http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/store/qrcode-app-for-sharepoint-WA103699711.aspx

http://qrcodeapp.codeplex.com/

There is mention of adding a second WordPress instance and using the same DB although I’m not willing to entertain that, Prod is Prod & hallowed be that principle.

Azure is still "preview" so this could change any day but here is the process for adding that second MySQL DB to use for a second WordPress instance.

Stage 1. Create a new MySQL DB with ClearDB

1. Go through Azure’s Portal > New > Store and add the free ClearDB MySQL Add on.
• You could also head over to https://www.cleardb.com/store/azure and get yourself a free 20MB MySQL database. You’ll have to wire up your DB Connection string yourself and manually install WordPress though. Not elegant, thankfully this is easier.
2. Ensure that your DB region will match your web-site region. I chose Northern Europe for ours, it’s apparently the newest and most powerful DC in Europe.

Stage 2. Create a new WordPress site on Azure with new DB

1. Follow the normal process for creating a WordPress site on Azure: New > Compute > Web Site > WordPress
2. Select the new DB you created in Stage 1.
3. Visit the site URL and complete the WordPress setup.

The downside of this wizard is that if you have may DB’s in the same region, you wouldn’t be able to identify it since during the Azure Store purchase you don’t see the database name, only the connection name. You’ll have to go an document your DB names before doing this.

The customer needed to swap out an Enterprise trial version of SQL and replace it with Express since the investment for Enterprise wasn’t forthcoming and neither was the investment for further immediate work in SharePoint.

They were however getting great value from Search within Search Server Express 2010 so didn’t want that to go anywhere, it was the entire companies home page!

When moving the databases from Enterprise to Express two errors were encountered during the database restore, one with the search Property database and one with the Web Analytics Report database.

After some research, I opted to correct the issue with the Property database but recreate the Web Analytics Report database.

Fix for the Property database

Follow the steps here –

http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-NZ/tfsadmin/thread/9365b0da-f5e9-4219-b8b2-498df11d921b

In Management Studio create a new query with the property DB selected and run this script –

SELECT

SCHEMA_NAME(sys.objects.schema_id) AS [SchemaName]

,OBJECT_NAME(sys.objects.object_id) AS [ObjectName]

,[rows]

,[data_compression_desc]

,[index_id] as [IndexID_on_Table]

FROM sys.partitions

INNER JOIN sys.objects

ON sys.partitions.object_id = sys.objects.object_id

WHERE data_compression > 0

AND SCHEMA_NAME(sys.objects.schema_id) <> ‘SYS’

ORDER BY SchemaName, ObjectName

For me is listed out the following tables using the data compression and vardecimal storage format –

• MSSAlertDocHistory
• MSSDefinitions
• MSSDefinitions
• MSSDocProps
• MSSDocProps
• MSSDocProps
• MSSDocResults
• MSSDocSdids

As per the fix, then run this script against these tables –

ALTER INDEX ALL ON <TABLE NAME>

REBUILD WITH (DATA_COMPRESSION = None);

Backup the database and then restore it over to the SQL Express instance and it worked.

For the Web analytics db, simply recreate the Web Analytics Service Application in Central Administration.

Errors during the SQL Express DB Restore

TITLE: Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio

——————————

Restore of database ‘Search_Service_Application_PropertyStoreDB’ failed. (Microsoft.SqlServer.Management.RelationalEngineTasks)

——————————

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION:

An exception occurred while executing a Transact-SQL statement or batch. (Microsoft.SqlServer.SmoExtended)

——————————

Database ‘Search_Service_Application_PropertyStoreDB’ cannot be started in this edition of SQL Server because part or all of object ‘MSSDocSdids’ is enabled with data compression or vardecimal storage format. Data compression and vardecimal storage format are only supported on SQL Server Enterprise Edition.

Database ‘Search_Service_Application_PropertyStoreDB’ cannot be started because some of the database functionality is not available in the current edition of SQL Server. (Microsoft SQL Server, Error: 909)

For help, click: http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink?ProdName=Microsoft%20SQL%20Server&EvtSrc=MSSQLServer&EvtID=909&LinkId=20476

——————————

BUTTONS:

OK

——————————

and

TITLE: Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio

——————————

Restore of database ‘WebAnalyticsReport’ failed. (Microsoft.SqlServer.Management.RelationalEngineTasks)

——————————

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION:

An exception occurred while executing a Transact-SQL statement or batch. (Microsoft.SqlServer.SmoExtended)

——————————

Database ‘WebAnalyticsReport’ cannot be started in this edition of SQL Server because it contains a partition function ‘DateIdPF’. Only Enterprise edition of SQL Server supports partitioning.

Database ‘WebAnalyticsReport’ cannot be started because some of the database functionality is not available in the current edition of SQL Server. (Microsoft SQL Server, Error: 905)

For help, click: http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink?ProdName=Microsoft%20SQL%20Server&EvtSrc=MSSQLServer&EvtID=905&LinkId=20476

——————————

BUTTONS:

OK

——————————

Moral of the story

SQL Enterprise automatically enables features in tables and rows so downgrading editions can always be a pain.

Requirement

• Create a SharePoint group in a site collection
• Assign that group an existing permission for Site Permissions list
• Add an Active Directory group to that SharePoint group
• Read the values from a CSV file
• Repeat for 1000 groups spread across multiple site collections
• The Site Collection Admin will run the script and be added as owner automatically

Solution

function global:New-SPGroup {
#Parameters that the script offers out to use,
# e.g. New-SPGroup -SiteCollection “http://intranet/sitecollection” -ADGroupName “domain\ADgroup” -SPGroupName “SharePoint Group 1″ -SPGroupDescription “Group Description” -SPGroupPermission “Permission”
[CmdletBinding()]
Param(
[Microsoft.SharePoint.PowerShell.SPWebPipeBind]
[string]$SiteCollection,
[string]$ADGroupName,
[string]$SPGroupName,
[string]$SPGroupDescription,
[string]$SPGroupPermission
)

#Required variabales for dev or single item runs, remove # and highlight from here down to above CSV section in Powershell ISE
#$SiteCollection = “http://site/sitecollection”
#$ADGroupName = “domain\adgroup”
#$SPGroupName = “My Test Group A1″
#$SPGroupDescription = “Test Group A1′s Description” #Note: do not use” – ” in description, i.e. space hyphen space
#$SPGroupPermission = “Read”

#Start of script
$site = Get-SPWeb $SiteCollection

#Check if the group already exists
if ($site.SiteGroups["SPGroupName"] -eq $null)
{

#Ensure Group/User is part of site collection users beforehand and add them if needed
$site.EnsureUser(“$ADGroupName”)

# Get the AD Group/User in a format that PowerShell can use otherwise there will be a string error
$ADGroupSPFriendly = $site | Get-SPUser $ADGroupName

#Create the SharePoint Group – Group Name, Group Owner, Group Member, Group Description. Can’t add AD group yet…
$NewSPGroup = $site.SiteGroups.Add($SPGroupName, $site.CurrentUser, $site.CurrentUser, $SPGroupDescription)
$site.AssociatedGroups.Add($site.SiteGroups["$SPGroupName"]);
$NewSPAccount = $site.SiteGroups["$SPGroupName"]

#Assign the Group permission
$GroupAssignment = New-Object Microsoft.SharePoint.SPRoleAssignment($NewSPAccount)
$GroupRole = $site.RoleDefinitions["$SPGroupPermission"]
$GroupAssignment.RoleDefinitionBindings.Add($GroupRole)
$site.RoleAssignments.Add($GroupAssignment)

#Add the AD Group/User to the group, can’t be done during group creation when using Powershell otherwise errors so is done now.
Set-SPUser -Identity $ADGroupSPFriendly -Web $SiteCollection -Group $SPGroupName
}
$site.Dispose()
}

#Read from the CSV input file
#CSV file must have header row – SiteColl, AdSecGroup, SPSecGroupName, SPGroupDesc, SPGroupPerm
#No “” around any items in the CSV file are needed
$csv = Import-csv -path D:\DEVGroupNameCSVFile2.csv
if ($csv -ne $null) {
foreach($line in $csv)
{
[string]$SiteCollection = $line.SiteColl;
[string]$ADGroupName = $line.AdSecGroup;
[string]$SPGroupName = $line.SPSecGroupName;
[string]$SPGroupDescription = $line.SPGroupDesc;
[string]$SPGroupPermission = $line.SPGroupPerm

New-SPGroup -Site $SiteCollection -ADGroupName $ADGroupName -SPGroupName $SPGroupName -SPGroupDescription $SPGroupDescription -SPGroupPermission $SPGroupPermission;
}
}

I hope someone else finds this script useful since all I found on the web were partial answers at best, and with a few solutions that didn’t match the requirement.

Errors encountered along the way and running the script

“You cannot add a domain group to a group.” – You can however add your AD group to the SharePoint group after is it created, just not while you are creating it. Resolved by the last part of the function.

Exception calling “Add” with “4″ argument(s): “The specified name is already in use. Please try again with a new name.” – As it implies, this is a duplicate item in your CSV file.

References

Basis for script -

http://sharepointryan.com/2011/07/20/create-sharepoint-groups-using-powershell/

http://addictedtosharepoint.com/2011/07/23/adding-a-security-group-to-a-sharepoint-site-via-powershell/

http://www.iotap.com/Blog/tabid/673/entryid/154/Powershell-script-for-Adding-Active-Directory-Users-to-Sharepoint-2010-Groups.aspx

http://get-spscripts.com/2011/02/add-sharepoint-or-ad-groupuser-to-all.html

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4512548/how-to-add-ad-group-to-sharepoint-2010-spgroup-programmatically

http://shpstuff.blogspot.co.uk/2012/05/create-groups-in-site-collection-using.html

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3713497/how-to-get-spuser-object-using-user-id-domain-name-userid

Additional information that you might find useful -

http://sharepoint.stackexchange.com/questions/20739/add-users-to-sp-group

http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/eu/sharepointdevelopment/thread/2df1f82b-ba04-4378-9df8-6fb0bf8eeaa3

http://www.learningsharepoint.com/forum/sharepoint-2010-programming/add-user-with-powershell-in-sharepoint-2010-site/

http://social.technet.microsoft.com/forums/en-GB/sharepointadminprevious/thread/c9e11537-6b1a-46f6-b030-395f8ed1fbf7

http://social.technet.microsoft.com/forums/en-ZA/sharepointgeneralprevious/thread/0632b071-617f-4e93-bd06-ed85ab7ef4a6

I had to spend a little time today stopping Excel documents opening in the browser. Following the advice on the web didn’t really help and I was sure I had done the steps required. I was starting to doubt my sanity…

The error message

The client doesn’t want or need Excel Calculation Services (certainly not right now away) so it isn’t setup or configured but documents were still trying to open in the browser for all site collections on a single web application, yielding this error message:

“Unable to process the request. Wait a few minutes and try performing this operation again.”

Clearly this was never going to work in a few minutes…

Two levels of settings are always mentioned for this issue – the site collection level and, if necessary, at the document library level.

Neither of these resolved the issue for me.

The Fix

1. Go to Central Administration. Click on Site Actions > Site Settings. Under Site Collection administration, click on Site Collection Features and activate “Open Documents in Client Applications by Default”. (mentioned here, and yes… it doesn’t make sense as to why this should be the case)

2. Go to the Site Collection in question, Click on Site Actions > Site Settings. Under Site Collection administration, click on Site Collection Features and activate “Open Documents in Client Applications by Default”. (covered here in detail)

3. Go to the Document Library in question, Click on Library Settings, Advanced Settings and select either “Use the server default” or “Open in client application”.

From here on, Chrome will download the file and IE will prompt to open it – Read Only or Edit.

Ever since we moved our WordPress blog to Microsoft’s Windows Azure cloud hosting platform (see post), plugins have failed to update rendering them broken – this can quickly become a pain if it’s critical such as your SPAM comment plug-in!
The issue is mentioned ad nauseum here but I’m able to delete the plugin to get around the problem that some others seem unable to do, hence sharing our solution:

Steps to workaround the problem

1. Follow the post here on getting your FTP username and password if you haven’t already got it, then setup your connection in FileZilla.

2. Browse to the ftp path -  /site/wwwroot/wp-content/plugins, make a note of what appears there and compare it to your list of plugins installed on WordPress (wp-admin/plugins.php)

3. In Filezilla, delete the folders that refer to the failed updates.

4. In WordPress (wp-admin/plugins.php) re-add the plugins, then activate and configure them.

Hope this helps you. You’ll need to do this each time a plugin needs updating – dull!
However, from the thread mentioned above, it looks like a fix will be deployed pretty soon…

Previously we’d looked at moving exclusively to SharePoint online but due to our Reporting Services integration we couldn’t but I had already seen OneNotes happily syncing there to local clients from previous tests so I knew it worked.

Office 2013 Preview OneNote however, it hasn’t worked for me without making some tweaks to the registry. Your mileage may vary.

Tested combinations

Windows 8, Office 2013 (clean install), IE 10: Failed

Windows 8, Office 2013 (upgrade), IE 10: Failed

Windows 8, Office 2010, IE 10: Worked

Windows 7, Office 2013, IE 9: Worked

The obvious common part is Office 2013 Preview on Windows 8

The Error Message

We need a password to sync this notebook. (Error code: 0xE0000024).

Other reports

Several other people have reported that they had this error and several fixes under different contexts. Sadly though, none paned out and most referred to SkyDrive so were a no go anyway.

However, there was mention of registry keys and Forms Based Authentication so it got me thinking.

https://plus.google.com/116023016216120558685/posts/5YAK73L3idv

http://mundoepm.com.br/2012/08/02/onenote-we-need-the-password-to-sync-this-notebook-error-code-0xe0000024/

http://errorspotting.com/?p=51

http://blogs.office.com/b/microsoft-onenote/archive/2011/11/08/free-update-for-onenote-2010-improves-skydrive-and-sync-features.aspx

Deeper Dive into the traffic

On the failing Windows 8 machine I got fiddler going and had a look at what was going on when OneNote was trying to sync. In the header I saw the 403 response “Access Denied”. Well, at least this is something… Of course I tried logging into the site as well as microsoftonline.com for good measure too, no luck.

HTTP/1.1 403 FORBIDDEN
Content-Length: 13
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8
Server: Microsoft-IIS/7.5
X-SharePointHealthScore: 0
SPRequestGuid: 125fe39b-3155-0007-4d62-8cb2bb1fee0f
request-id: 125fe39b-3155-0007-4d62-8cb2bb1fee0f
X-Forms_Based_Auth_Required: https://thefullcircle.sharepoint.com/_forms/default.aspx?ReturnUrl=/_layouts/error.aspx
X-Forms_Based_Auth_Return_Url: https://thefullcircle.sharepoint.com/_layouts/error.aspx
X-MSDAVEXT_Error: 917656; Access denied. Before opening files in this location, you must first browse to the web site and select the option to login automatically.
X-Powered-By: ASP.NET
MicrosoftSharePointTeamServices: 15.0.0.4433
X-Content-Type-Options: nosniff
X-MS-InvokeApp: 1; RequireReadOnly
P3P: CP="ALL IND DSP COR ADM CONo CUR CUSo IVAo IVDo PSA PSD TAI TELo OUR SAMo CNT COM INT NAV ONL PHY PRE PUR UNI"
Date: Wed, 21 Nov 2012 16:19:25 GMT

All of this led me onto looking into the Sign in Assistant which was already installed but I went ahead and ran a repair. Still no change after a reboot.

The Fix

In a wiki page that talks about manually installing the Office 365 components there is a mention of a registry key for Office 2010 and Office 365 to play nice –

Microsoft Office 2010 Update

(KB2435954)

Microsoft Office 2010 on Windows XP with Internet Explorer 7

Allows users to access Microsoft SharePoint Online from Microsoft Word 2010, Microsoft Excel 2010, Microsoft PowerPoint 2010, and Microsoft OneNote 2010.

Important   In addition to applying this update, you must add the following registry key for each user: [HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Office\14.0\Common\Internet\FormsBasedAuthSettings\AllowFBANoPatches – DWORD: 1]

Also, If you have Office 2010 SP1 Beta installed, you will first need to uninstall the SP1 Beta before installing this update.

http://community.office365.com/en-us/wikis/administration/manually-install-office-365-desktop-updates.aspx

Well, well, well. What have you here? A registry key for allowing forms authentication stuff for Office 365. This looked too good to pass by without having a go.

Clearly the “14.0” needed to change to “15.0” for Office 2013 Preview and I tested it with HKLM rather than HKCU.

I created the key and…pay dirt. Closed OneNote and reopened it and it synced straight away.

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Office\15.0\Common\Internet\FormsBasedAuthSettings]
"AllowFBANoPatches"=dword:00000001

Update 22/11/2012

After another reboot the next day it looks another issue has popped in with syncing. Will update this post when I’ve investigated and resolved it.

We’re sorry, something went wrong during sync. We’ll try again later. (Error code: 0x5B4)

Error 1460 – Error Code 0x5B4

Windows Error Code 1460: ‘ERROR_TIMEOUT’

Description of Error:This operation returned because the timeout period expired.

References:

• http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj683102.aspx
• http://community.office365.com/en-us/wikis/administration/manually-install-office-365-desktop-updates.aspx
• https://plus.google.com/116023016216120558685/posts/5YAK73L3idv
• http://mundoepm.com.br/2012/08/02/onenote-we-need-the-password-to-sync-this-notebook-error-code-0xe0000024/
• http://errorspotting.com/?p=51
• http://blogs.office.com/b/microsoft-onenote/archive/2011/11/08/free-update-for-onenote-2010-improves-skydrive-and-sync-features.aspx

Everyone knows that using SQL connection alias’s are a pretty good idea, as are A records in DNS for when you want to be able swap around your SQL server when the fancy, need or emergency takes your fancy.

I recently was helping a customer trying to do just that but were implementing SQL Connection Alias’s for the first time in order to swap out an old, underpowered and overloaded SQL 2000 server with a more powerful SQL 2005 x64 machine running their MOSS 2007 farm.

As much as they tried, when the connection alias was put in place the servers came back with "Cannot connect to the configuration database". I got involved and even went as far as installing SQL Management Studio on the front end with the alias in place. Funny thing was – it worked. Despite the connection alias working properly the farm could not communicate with SQL.

After a lot of research, looking at logs and trying a few permutations on the cliconfg.exe tool I came across the answer. There were references to the SQL server by FQDN in the registry and the alias was only doing the host name.

This farm wasn’t well documented and even less well configured so finding this kind of inconsistency wasn’t surprising. Mike Hackers blog post mentioned the registry key as part of a post on another topic.

For my case I changed the 14.0 to 12.0 for this MOSS 2007 environment and edited the connection string.

My Computer
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE
SOFTWARE
Microsoft
Shared Tools
Web Server Extensions
14.0
Secure
ConfigDB

I changed the DSN value from the FQDN of "server.domain.local" to "server" and Central Administration came up.

Nasty little inconsistency from when the farm was setup.

Well, I wish it was mysterious. Actually, it was pretty obvious. The WordPress import tool isn’t exactly what you’d call robust.

Going into the wp-content/uploads folder on old hosting location (GoDaddy) and the new (Azure) showed that the WordPress import tool missed/failed to get the uploads folders from three years worth of blog posts.

So, all that was needed was to sync up the folders. No stress. Here we go.

Getting your FTP username and password for an Azure Web Site.

Thanks to Bertrand Le Roy’s blog post on where to find the user name because what you would consider to be the likely candidates for your login – the deployment user account shows as not set.

1. From your dashboard on Azure for the blog, download the publish profile -

2.  the XML file find your FTP user username and passwords -

Copy the missing files between the old and new location

1. Configure Filezilla with the connection to the FTP address listed on the dashboard.

2. Upload the missing years or months media from your old blog, either a local backup like the one I took or directly between the two FTP sites.

Why did it happen?

I’m sure a WordPress expert out there could reveal the mystery in detail, and migrating blogs isn’t exactly my day job - we’ll chalk this one down to “something went wrong but it was easy to fix”.