Personal Sites vs. My Site

Personal sites and the My Site feature are separate features that are both available only in SharePoint Portal Server. Although the names of these two features are often used as synonyms for each other, they are not the same. Site administrators need a good understanding of the architectural differences between the two features to understand differences in the behavior of each.
Personal sites are Windows SharePoint Services sites that are created for individual users. Every user who has the Create Personal Site right can have a personal site. By default, the location of a user's personal site is portalname/personal/username, where portalname is the name of the portal and username is the name of the individual user.
My Site is a single page located in the SharePoint Portal Server site. By default, the path for this page is portalname/My Site/default.asp, where portalname is the name of the portal. Every user who accesses the My Site URL downloads the same page. However, users often don't realize this because some of the information on the page is personalized based on the user's profile information and information from the user's personal site.
So the difference between My Site and personal sites is that My Site is the portal page through which all users must pass to get to their own personal site. A user links to his personal site through the My Site page. It is hard to recognize that the My Site portal page is the same for everyone because it has personalization features. My Site is personalized based on a user's profile information, and it includes links to document libraries and lists that the user has created on her personal site.
The major architectural difference is that the My Site page is owned and controlled by the site owner, while a personal site is owned and controlled by the user. This means that a user can customize the contents and views of her personal site; however, when a user tries to personalize the My Site page, the choices are limited

Shared Services - provisioning in progress - does not complete

I was trying to create a new SSP for other site collection on MOSS 2007. The 'Configuration of the shared services' seemed never to complete. In 'Manage this Farm's Shared Services' It says: 'Provisioning in progress' for new SSP. I solved this by starting the Windows Sharepoint Services Timer on second server, it was stopped and I also restarted timer on app server.

How to restore site using content db only

To restore a site on the same or different machine using the content db backup follow the steps given below:
Create a new Web application on the destination server.
Go to central admin --> content database . Click on the new web app content db.
Remove the content db.
Go to SQL server mgmt studio and create a new db with the same name as the content db backup you are having.
After creation right click restore. Choose the backup file location. From the options tab choose 'overwrite'.
Restore this db backup.
Go to central admin --> content database again and select ' add a content db ' to the web application.
specify the name of the restored db.
Done

Export sharepoint using stsadm command

if you have already exported a sahrepoint site or subsite then you can import it into another WSS site or into a WSS site sitting underneath your MOSS 2007 site. Here is the command line instructions:
stsadm.exe -o import -url
-filename
-includeusersecurity
-haltonwarning
-haltonfatalerror -updateversions <1-4>
1 - Add new versions to the current file
2 - Overwrite the file and all its versions
3 - Ignore the file
4 - Terminate with conflicts
-quiet
And here is an example:
stsadm.exe -o import -url http://sharepointsitname/NewlyImportedSite -filename C:\backups\backup.bak -includeusersecurity -haltonfatalerror -updateversions 1
This will import my backup file named backup.bak to the site named NewlyImportedSite that sites beneath my MOSS site, it will, of course, include all of the user security from the exported site, it will stop importing if it encounters a fatal error and will update the versions of the site instead of deleting them and replacing them.

The search service is currently offline.

I was configuring search for Sharepoint farm and I got message when I try to search "The search service is currently offline.". I found help from this thread.
Repeating steps again.

1. In the Component Services snap-in, expand Computers, expand My Computer, and double-click DCOM Config.

2. Locate application OSearch.

3. Right-click the program name, and then select Properties.

4. On the Security tab, in the Launch and Activation Permissions group box, select Customize, and then click Edit.

5. Add the user Network Services and grant permissions Local Launch and Local Activation.

6. Restart the computer.

Now search start working..

Sharepoint FBA site with ADAM authentication

I was searching for help to configure ADAM authentication provider for my FBA sharepoint site and I found below link is very useful.

http://blogs.pointbridge.com/Blogs/morse_matt/Pages/Post.aspx?_ID=2.

Hope this will help others also.

Unprovisioning Shared services hanged

I had to delete my shared services which was not in use and its hanged forever.

Then I applied below command, it took some time, but finally deleted..

stsadm -o deletessp -title SharedServices1 -force

Change association of Shared services in central administration

1. If you do not want to change the web application hosting the my sites, before changing the association, edit my site setting for SSP B, set the my site to point to the old my sites URL and delete the temp my site web application, then perform the association
2. If you start from having just one web application that hosts all the sites (portal, ssp administration site host, my sites) here’s what you need to do to separate them:
Scenario :
portal url : http://portal/
Administration site host for the ssp http://portal/ssp/admin
mysites host http://portal/personal
Issue A: you cannot change the association for the administration site host of an ssp
i : create a new web application to host the administration site for the OLD SSP
http://newsite:10000/
backup the site at http://portal/ssp/admin
stsadm –o backup –url http://portal/ssp/admin –filename c:\sspadmin
ii. create a managed path (explicit inclusion) in the new site to point to /ssp/admin
http://newsite:10000/ssp/admin
restore the backup you just created at this location
stsadm –o restore –url http://newsite:10000/ssp/admin –filename c:\sspadmin –overwrite
change the ssp administration site host from http://portal/ssp/admin to http://newsite:10000/ssp/admin
stsadm –o editssp –title “your old ssp name” –sspadminsite “http://newsite:10000/ssp/admin”
Now you can change the portal association between the SSPs

Issue B:
how to move the mysites from http://portal/personal to a new webapplication at http://mysite/ ?
(mysite web application was created either when creating the new SSP as the new mysite host or manually using My Site Host template, in which case you need to add an wildcard inclusion to /personal manged path)
backup and restore
enumerate all the mysites that were already created (output it to a file for easier work):
stsadm –o enumsites –url http://portal/personal/ > c:\mysites.txt
edit the txt file and create 3 batch files ot of it:
one for backing up the mysites, one for creating the destination mysites , one for restoring from backup at the destination:
for instance, the following line from the initial file resulted (mysites.txt)
http://portal/personal/username Owner="Domain\username" SecondaryOwner="Domain\administrator" ContentDatabase="ContentDBName" StorageUsedMB="0.4" StorageWarningMB="80" StorageMaxMB="100" />

will become (in 3 bat files):
stsadm -o backup -url http://portal/personal/username -filename c:\backup\username.dat
stsadm -o createsite -url http://mysite/personal/username -sitetemplate SPSPERS -owneremail username@domain.com -ownerlogin "Domain\username"
stsadm -o restore -url http://mysite/personal/username -filename c:\backup\username.dat –overwrite
same for the rest of my sites

Retraction or deployment timer job hangs

During the execution of a retraction/deployment the timer job may hang showing 'Retracting' or 'Deploying' and never completes.

This is cause from one of the WFE not being able to finalize the retraction or deployment.

To resolve this issue go to each WFE in the farm and execute stsadm.exe -o execadmsvcjobs.
This command take time to complete.