Well, the "SharePoint Trail Expired" issue finally hit my SharePoint. Besides this being total crap (How can a non-Trial edition of software Expire?), what pain in ass! Once again <onto the soapbox> that piece of crap to prevent software pirates from sealing has given a false positive to us that actual have paid for licensing. Having a software bug is one thing, but writing bad software that goes out of its way to disable itself…

 You know, I have yet to see anything that is “Protected” not be broken. Why? It’s simple,  by the very nature of software protection schemes a totally effective protection strategy means that one has to create software that does not work or will not work at some point. I think back to the days of Lotus 123. Mission #1 of Lotus was to make absolutely sure that their product would not work unless you had the Master disc in the drive. Yeah, that was a floppy disc, by the way. Do you see any potential problems with that? Yeap, ever single bad thing that was possible to happen to that Master Floppy Disc did occur… and it occurred on such a vast scale (because Lotus sold tons that their spreadsheet) that Lotus put in place the policy that they would charge licensed customers fees for replacing bad Master Discs. So, when is the last time you heard of anything regarding a Lotus SpreadSheet? Or for that matter Lotus anything? Lotus products do still exist. IBM bought all of that software years ago and some of it is still around (Lotus Notes is used by lots of folks). But a Lotus SpreadSheet? Moral of this story, piss off enough of your customers with your paranoid approach of protecting your software to the point that your software is useless and so expensive and someone will find a way to use something else (ever heard of Excel? Or the other Free SpreadSheet software?).

Ok <off the soapbox>….

 If you do run into the issue of your licensed SharePoint installation Expiring itself, there are a number of good articles on the web to help you through it. In my case, I ran the SharePoint Configuration, without changing anything, and then I did a enable of Enterprise Features in the Operations Admin… and my SharePoint is happy again.

~cse

So, I’m back on this topic of messing up… I mean making changes to SharePoint pages. As you read around the web you will fine that most folks (including Microsoft, and for that matter even SharePoint itself) would like you to use SharePoint Designer to make changes to your SharePoint pages. I don’t have any real reason not to like this idea. In fact, SharePoint Designer it quite familiar to me since I used FrontPage for lots of years. Generally speaking I would also jump onto that Bandwagon of folks that say… just use the Designer. There is, however, one caveat… gee were you expecting there not to be one?

The caveat with using SharePoint Designer is less about the tool itself and more about how SharePoint will not allow you to touch (at least not easily) certain parts of itself. Yes, believe it on not, there are ‘hidden’ places in SharePoint that are not directly exposed to the network through the normal means (what the hell do I mean by that?). Well in short, when you open your SharePoint site using the Designer, most of the folder structure is exposed for you to look at and make modifications to. Except of course the ‘hidden’ stuff… and those parts that SharePoint would prefer you to modify using the built in ‘Edit Page’ functionally (more on that later).

Now, why am I going on about this? Well it gets back to some general modifications I wanted to do to my site. Specifically, I wanted to remove from the very top right global links to ‘My Site’… I felt these links were unnecessary and in fact these links pointed to the server on my intranet (which when one accesses from the Internet…they of course fail). So the task was to remove all of this from every page. At first it seemed a simple matter, after all those top links are in the Default Master page… change the master page and it changes on every page within my SharePoint… yeah! Right! Yeah! No it doesn’t!

As it turns out, there are more than one Master page and more than one location for these special pages!! Yeah!

So, you start off with editing your SharePoint site with SharePoint Designer and you can locate what is generally called the Default Master page for you site. Look under _catalog off the main sited. In there you will see a masterpage (gallery folder). Now, within that folder you can find the magical Default.Master file. Yes, that is the one… at last! You found it.

If you don’t have versioning turned on your site…now is a good time to think about turning it on. If you mess up or modify this file in ways that cause your site to … well look strange, then you may want to be able to undo your mods.

Next entry… where’s the ‘other’ master pages and how can I screw with them?

Ok, so it wasn't quite a Fortnight... sure as hell seemed like it...

 The question, how to change the SharePoint 2007 (Moss) Default master page from the Internet?

Seems like a mostly harmless question... after all it's Just HTML... right? Yeah!

 There appears to be two options for messing with (or up) your Opening SharePoint page. The first option involves trying to actually find where the SharePoint HTML files are. If you guessed in the IIS default location, you would be sadly walking down the wrong path. Buried over in the Program Files area of your system disc is where you will find SharePoint (plenty places in Google to tell you the path). The second option is to use SharePoint Designer (a re-tread of FrontPage) and edit the site from SharePoint it self.

Over the next couple of Blog entries, I'm going to record my trip down the dark path of doing stuff to the Opening page... I decided to split up my thoughts on this into a few posts - mainly because there is a lot to cover, but also I'm in interrupt mode and can't seem to get this whole thing on-line... anyway, I promise the wait will be worth it... for what it's worth...

~cse

So… as if I don’t have have enough Geeky things to do…like fixing the crappy plumbing in the kitchen (ok, that’s not really a geeky thing)… I had a missing to crank up Moss (a.k.a SharePoint 2007) for the Crafty Divas.

Well, this is normally not that big a deal. Moss is very complicated, but it does a lot without much tweaking out of the box. Of course, that’s if you don’t start messing around with…which I, being who I am, did. And, as one might guess…I somewhat broken…well I really didn’t break it…Moss just kind of developed issues.

After hours of trying to re-install and re-build Moss… basically, it came down to a Hotfix that was installed over a period of time since the last install of Moss. This so-called ‘Fix’ from Microsoft causes the instance of SQL Server install to fail during the Moss setup. Great! Yeah!

How did I trick it out? Simple install Moss…let it fail…then install an SQL Instance named OFFICESERVERS… simple? Nope. It take me all day to come to that conclusion… and in the end the battle was won and SharePoint is back up and on-line. Well, mostly that is… I still have some fixes to put in the SharePoint site.

~cse