Psychology Technology

When creating a document library, sometimes templates will be added as a document, rather than as a custom type template.

Here is how to get your templates to appear in a document library:

• Create a template document in your favorite compatible Office application for Word, Spreadsheet, Powerpoint documents.
• Navigate to your site, and create a Custom Content Type for each template you will add later.
  • Site Actions, Site Settings, under Galleries select Site Content Types
  • Click Create
  • Provide a name and description
  • choose the appropriate parent content type (Document Content Types)
  • Choose a parent content type of ‘Document’
  • Select an existing group to add the content type in to ( Document Content Types)
• Navigate to your Document Libaray and add the Templates
  • Switch to Explorer View
  • Navigate in to the Forms folder
  • Add each of your required templates
• Choose Settings, Document Library Settings
• Advanced Settings (in the first column)
• Choose Yes for ‘Allow Management of Content Types?’ and click OK
• Navigate back to the Settings
• Now under Content Types, we can add additional Templates
  • Add from existing Content Types
  • Find your newly added Template in the list (The name you gave the ‘content type’)
  • Select it, click the Add button, then choose OK
• Now when you choose a New… document in the library, you will be able to choose from the added templates

So what are the pros of doing this?  Why not just add a document to the library and use that as the ‘master template’ ?

You will not be able to re-use that template across your enterprise.  It will only be available in that particular document library.  Also, adding the custom content type allows you to build up some rich meta-data around your documents, which will otherwise remain captured and isolated within a document.  For example, if your documents are around projects and resource hours available, you could ensure that one of the required meta-data fields to be filled in is the estimated resource in hours.  now you can report on that data in a List, or if you have MOSS, KPIs within a dashboard.

This is a humbling step from the now rather archaic method of a file/folder structure, but once your organization catches on, it can become an informationally rich resource much more than what any one document can provide.

Today after successfully testing the February Cumulative updates for WSS and Office Server 2007 (KB978395 and KB978396), I went to apply these in the production environment.  Somewhat to my suprise, when starting the updates, a message read that:

“There are no products affected by this package installed on this system.”

Well then!  What I forgot to take in to account, is that my VM testing was done on the 32 bit platform, whereas our production environment is x64.  Downloading the correct platform updates from the same KB article will get things going for you.

Recently in a locked down environment, it was reported that the search service would not start.  This was preventing an application-based backup of the Project Server farm.

The Application Event log error was Event ID 10029, and reads:

Error backing up registry hive to the configuration database.

The reason this occured is because Group Policy was preventing access to the registry (and/or command line) despite the account having the necessary Local Administrator permissions.  We confirmed this was the case by using RunAs… and trying to start registry editor, which gave a nice message stating this was not allowed.

The resolution obviously, is to move the search service account in to a less restrictive Group Policy, or mark an explicit allow on the local machine GP as that should take precedence over any Domain Group Policy.

our environment started to have errors after a cluster failover and SQL hotfix applied to 9.0.4053

When starting the search service from within Central Administration, Operations, Services on Server, Search, we got errors like: 

Databases must be empty before they can be used.  Delete all of the tables, stored procedures and other objects or use a different database.

and

‘databaseName’ is not empty and does not match current database schema

Luckily this was not a content database, and living without search for a short while is tolerable in the environment.  The first attempt to resolve was to fail the cluster back over (though that was upgraded as well) but the issue persisted.  Second, I performed a Point In Time recovery on the search database, though that proved to not help.  Lastly, with success, I dropped the existing Search Database (you may have to stop the Search Service in services.msc or kill any open connections), created a new blank database, and the service started no problem.