STSADM

Within our SPS 2003 environment we stored employee pictures in a picture library. We then set the users Picture URL profile property to point to their picture in this library. The problem was that as soon as we upgraded the paths to these pictures no longer worked.

For some web applications you’re going to need to have tight controls over who can create sites and who can’t. One simple thing you can do to prevent users from creating sites is to disable self service site creation.

In SharePoint Portal Server 2003 we had allowed users to add web parts from the online web part gallery. In going to MOSS 2007 we decided that we no longer wanted users to be able to do this as it tended to reduce the security of the site and adversely affect performance (not to mention that fact that it was annoying having a weather web part on every page).

One of things I found that I had to do a lot with the upgraded site (or even a new, from scratch, portal) was to connect the various web applications and site collections to the main portal (results in adding a link to the top left bread crumb trail).

As we were doing our upgrade we realized early on that we did not want to keep the SSP as it was migrated during the upgrade process. The upgraded version just locked us into to many things that we didn’t like.

Before I talk about the commands that I’ve created I wanted to spend a moment to show how I’ve approached the creation of the commands. If you’re faced with a situation like mine where you have to automate numerous MOSS configurations then you basically have two options – the first is to use STSADM (and possibly custom extensions) and the third is to just write your own console or WinForm app and plug away against the API.

So this is my first posting to my first blog. I’ve been wanting to start blogging for quite some time now but either haven’t found the time or the inspiration. Lately I’ve been doing a lot of SharePoint work for the company I work for (Edfinancial Services).