Sharepoint 2007 - “Cannot install the package” during service pack installation

Install Sharepoint 2007 SP2 on a test server I ran into this problem. No log, no additional info.

The work around I found was:

• Run officeserver2007sp2-kb953334-x86-fullfile-en-us /extract:c:\mytempdir
• In this way I’ve got all the Sharepoint SP2 patches available in a temp directory
• I’ve installed manually the available patches
• 
• Now it seems that everything is right!

Technorati Tags: Sharepoint 2007

Sharepoint 2010 Beta 2 Available

Ok, the time for the braves is arrived!

Sharepoint 2010 is available to MSDN subscribers.

Marco (my colleague owner og my account) please, go on with the new servers!

Technorati Tags: Sharepoint 2010

Microsoft ALM Day – Rome and Milan

The last week I had the opportunity to speak at the second edition of Microsoft ALM Day (Application Lifecycle Management) the 5th in Rome and the 6th in Milan. Here my presentation.

I love these events because I always to meet great people (dr. Ivar Jacobson during the previous edition, Brian Harry in Rome and Brian Keller).

I also had to opportunity to speak and eat with great and BIG people. Thanks Lorenzo for the fillet….

Technorati Tags: ALM,VisualStudio 2010,Speech

Visual Studio 2010

The previous week I attended to the Microsoft Inner Circle Partner Summit in Rome about Visual Studio and ALM (Application Lifecycle Management) topics.

Brian Harry announced the availability of Visual Studio 2010 for the Q1-2010, while the RC should be shipped for the end of the year.

The only certain thing is the product launch that will be held on march 22nd, at this moment is also sure that the RTM will be made available a little bit earlier or a little bit later :-P

The suite has been rebranded and the Team System name is gone on retirement (well officially the last Team System brand name will be the 22nd march)!

There are going to be 3 main products:

• Visual Studio 2010 Professional/MSDN (more or less is Visual Studio 2008 Professional Edition)
• Visual Studio 2010 Premium/MSDN
• Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate/MSDN

But the big stuff are on the supporting tools:

• Visual Studio Test Elements 2010 to create test cases and manages test execution (manually or partially automated);
• Visual Studio Team Lab Management 2010 to integrate and automate the virtual machines management in the ALM;
• Visual Studio Team Foundation Server 2010 now installable on Windows 7/Vista, included with MSDN and also with the CAL!

In the following pics the features stack of the different VS products:

These are the technology enablers to build real software farms!

More when I will have the time to delivery and reorganize our internal procedures of Milan Campus to leverages the new features!

Technorati Tags: VisualStudio 2010

Sharepoint Conference 2009

I’m back from the Sharepoint Conference 2009 from a couple of weeks (it has been held on 19-22 October in Las Vegas) and I’m in a huge late in publishing some personal annotation from there.

The keynote was driven by Tom Rizzo and Steve Ballmer

The key messages were:

• Beta will be available November, the goal is to made the RTM available for the 2Q 2010;
• One thing is Sharepoint 2010 on premises, on thing is Sharepoint Online (business opportunities and different target for them);
• Sharepoint Services is going to change is name to Sharepoint Foundation and it will not be longer part of Windows Server (it will be an independent downloadable package);
• Total integration between Development Environment (VS2010), BDC (now Business Connectivity Services) and Office 2010;
• Sharepoint now run on Windows 7/Vista to leverage the integration with VS2010 (this is real happiness for me and many of my customers);

• Full Ajax support to reduce the front-end flickering;
• Full WEB 2.0 , social and and community features (document rating), the idea is to “recreate” the Facebook experience in Sharepoint for business purpose;
• The User Interface is totally based on Ribbons (like Office 2007);
• Full Streaming support for video, audio and pics (I guess that someone will run his own clone of youporn on SP2010!). This is to better support SilverLight development;
• I love BI and I was impressed by PowerPivot (it’s an in-memory database)
• I’ve seen filtering from Excel 2010 100 milions rows in less than 1 second! Simply incredible!!
• Performance Point now is part of Sharepoint (this is a huge news from a strategic perspective because in this way it should be easier to push it to the SMI market, where Perfomance Point alone wasn’t a justified as an investment);
• Groove is now fully integrated with Sharepoint providing offline support (but offline and syncing is also possible with Office 2010)
• Access, Visio, Word services and services architecture (yes Access, Visio and Word now work on server side)
• Full REST architecture to access the Sharepoint data (very exciting for me’cause I’m a REST fan)
• Huge improvement on Document Libraries performance. Now each folder could host one milion items.
• Workflow, seems to work on .Net 3.5, I don’t see big news maybe the management from Sharepoint Designer where the workflow now are reusable and can be export/imported with VS2010;
• Shared Services have been reengineered and now they are called Application Services and are sharable between more server farms;
• Sand-Boxed Application, developers can leverage a developer mode to sand-box the application guaranteeing the reliability of the farm. Very interesting but the development model still seems tricky and challenging.

Technorati Tags: Sharepoint 2010

London Technology Network – Intelligent Transport Conference

Here my presentation from the 01st July conference in London (I’m in huge late in blogging!).

It has been just a 5 mins speech about the awesome TIQ projects :-D on industrial vehicles tracking.

(Ok ok it’s always the same stuff).

The important thing in this blog is the excellent job made by friend Alessandro Faraci the London Technology Network business development manager and the  conference chairman.

Technorati Tags: Tracking,Speech

TFS, Conchango and MOSS

I'm working with a customer deploying MOSS 2007 and TFS 2008 in the same server farm, sharing the DB between the 2 environments and also the MOSS portal with TFS.

Indeed the topology is quite easy, with three servers:

• A SQL-Server 2005 with SSAS, SSIS;
• The TFS Application tier with SSRS;
• The MOSS FE (with the TFS WSS extension)

Customer adopted a SCRUM methodology and would like to leverage the Conchango template, but I got in trouble because you've to manually setup Conchango on a dual server TFS topology, manually deploying a Sharepoint solution (Conchango).

I was unable to deploy the Conchango templates and after having thought it was caused by my fault, I found the following error in Sharepoint logs:

10/28/2009 10:59:38.94 OWSTIMER.EXE (0x0B64) 0x0A78 Windows SharePoint Services Timer 5utx Unexpected The timer service could not initialize its configuration, please check the configuration database. Will retry later.

This one, usually is due to a problem in Sharepoint configuration cache that can be easily resolved forcing an update of the cache (take a look to the blog post).

It didn't worked for me so I had to remove the server from the farm (easy in my scenario because it was just an 1 server farms) with:

psconfig -cmd configdb disconnect

The reinsert the server itself in the farm just with psconfigui.exe

To deploy Conchango is mandatory to install Team Explorer both on Sharepoint FE and on the TFS AT.

I don't like having team explorer on a MOSS FE, but in this case I need it because on the same server there is also Team System Web Access and explorer is a requirements also for it.

To manually deploy Conchango on Sharepoint : stsadm -o Conchango.TeamSystem.Scrum.Sharepoint.wsp from the path C:\Program Files\Conchango\Scrum for Team System\SFTS WSS Template