Bing... lets hope its a bang.

Well tomorrow is the big day apparently. So Lets hope for the best for Microsoft's latest search attempt. Bing and the Bing decision engine (based on the 'Fast' search technology Microsoft acquired a few years back) seems to indeed have the potential to be a 'google-killer'. As much I dislike some of the google search engine's features and occasional questionable relevence matching, I always find myslef coming back to it.

There just isnt anything else out there as fast and relevant as it unfortunately. I believe in healthy competition so I wouldnt like to see bing be a 'google-killer' but lets just hope it can survive next to the marketting god. From what I have seen I am pretty impressed.

For more info:

http://www.bing.com/ComingSoon

SP2, epic fail

Well its not as epic a failure as the title suggests, but it is a bit of unnecessary bad publicity for sure. It seems there is an issue when upgrading MOSS 2007 with Service Pack 2.

The license of your farm is automatically transformed into a SharePoint 2007 evaluation license.

This can be fixed by re-entering your key in the 'Convert License Type' under Operations in Central Administration:




This is a fairly quick fix and Microsoft are working on a hot fix now. To me this isn't really a huge problem however it could have been had they not found this.

You can read more about this here:

http://blogs.msdn.com/sharepoint/archive/2009/05/21/attention-important-information-on-service-pack-2.aspx

Service Pack 2 and .NET Framework 3.5 SP1

It seems that a previous post I did (http://koobarspoint.blogspot.com/2008/11/sharepoint-infrastructure-update-broke.html) on Loopback Checks regarding search service accounts are being encountered by SharePoint Service Pack 2 when using .NET framework SP1. I have experienced this across a number of different environments where this combination has been used.

It's an easy enough fix (regedit) however this should be something that Microsoft perhaps fixed with SP2 as from what I have read this is a 'by design' 'feature' to the .NET framework as part of Service Pack 1.

Anyway, if you are experiencing HTTP 401.1 Unauthorized access directly on your server, or you are experiencing service account failure audits in your event log.

Try this on:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/896861

Explorer View on Server 2003

I have come across some older servers running WSS 3.0 and MOSS 2007 in my time. More than once I have come across the inability to use 'Explorer View' on the server. After ensuring that there were correct security zone settings for the intranet site I started scouring the web when it still would not function correctly. After some snooping around I stumbled upon this:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=17C36612-632E-4C04-9382-987622ED1D64&displaylang=en

Installing this fixed the problem on Windows Server 2003 and also Small Business Server 2003. Hopefully it will help those experiencing the same frustrating issue.