Alpesh Nakar's Blog

This post has been in draft since last 2 years and would probably not see the light of the day if it had not been for me having to delete the SharePoint 2010 Search Service Application couple of times recently using this technique…

I have had this “consistent” experience of not being able to delete the Search Service Applicaiton from Central Administration

Remove-SPServiceApplication -id [] should do the trick… but if it doesn’t – our good old STSADM will nail it. Thanks to a forum post I had seen then… STSADM works everytime…

Here is the solution

Get -SPServiceApplication

Grab the Search Service Application id – [for example] 30b15b57-6bec-46b5-990d-541d99bab53b

then use this

Stsadm -o deleteconfigurationobject -id 30b15b57-6bec-46b5-990d-541d99bab53b (Preferred over the next method of PowerShell)

or

Remove-SPServiceApplication -id [id of Search Service Application] -confirm:$false -RemoveData

That’s it!

Ok so you have signed for Office 365 and would like to use Lync on your work laptop, but your company has not moved to Lync OR you have Lync for work but cannot add people outside of your organization and you would like to use your personal Lync, then what options do you have? This is part of my Office 365 blog post series

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What a pain! (Kind of, till I found out why the pain and how to work around that)

I was using Microsoft BPOS since last couple of months for some of my active domains with limited users and last month, I planned to move them over to Office 365.

Microsoft have a BPOS to Office 365 transition web site, which is pretty useless. Useless since it does not have any tools or guidance that I could use to make a smooth transition. Thankfully I hadn’t started using SharePoint in BPOS, so migrating data from BPOS (SharePoint) to Office 365 (SharePoint) is one less headache to take care of… very glad, given the pain I went through to migrate from BPOS to Office 365 for 3 users mailbox and behind the scenes with DNS, etc.

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Of all days in the week, on Sunday [August 21, 2011] I decided to tease my SharePoint 2010 development environment! I decided to change all the SharePoint 2010 Service Account(s)password.

Thank you Microsoft for introducing the managed accounts, else I would be clicking away for a long time, having to go through each application pool to change the password (map this scenario to MOSS 2007 or WSSv3). With managed accounts associated with application pools, it was a matter of changing the password for the managed account and it would ‘cascade’ down…

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Why not? To continue on our series on Office 365 and then you can decide if you want to move to Office 365 or not.

In the previous post, we introduced the concept of the ‘in the cloud’ offering from Microsoft namely Office 365 and what is the offering under the banner of Office 365.

The next question that may pop is “Why Office 365?”

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This year in March, 2011 I presented two sessions at Microsoft Tech.Ed India 2011 Edition in Bangalore and it was a great to connect with the Indian Tech Community! You can read more about my experience at Microsoft Tech.Ed India 2011 here and I had shared my conference slides here.

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This is a continuation of the series Re Imaging SharePoint VMs on the fly.

Now that you have captured your bootable virtual hard drive that was prepared for SharePoint Installation, you can apply that to another active partition or a virtual hard drive and then install whichever flavour of SharePoint you please!

As seen in the earlier post, capturing a virtual hard drive to create a Windows Image File is time consuming (compared to taking a snapshot in VMWare or Hyper-V) and memory intensive as well, however the advantage is that you can leverage on bare metal power – like having dual boot or multi-boot environment on your laptop.

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