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!

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

Once you have finished with the task of preparing the virtual machine, it’s time to create a Windows Image File (WIM) for re-use at a later stage.

Navigate to the folder where you have imagex.exe

Run this command

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Yes, I have been very slack in not uploading my slides from last 3 presentations and I have heaps of excuses… but I will keep the good news in the forthcoming post.

These are my session slides from Microsoft Tech.Ed India 2011 sessions and Australian SharePoint Conference 2011. Read the rest of this entry »

Family and friends have been asking me – what does “In the Cloud” mean? To add fuel to the fire, Apple announced iOS5 and the iCloud. First off, these cloud based offerings are not new. Before we get any further, let’s quickly understand this “cloud”.

What is ‘in the cloud’?

In the cloud means your data is stored off-site on a managed infrastructure. In other words, you are out-sourcing your infrastructure team, literally! What out-sourcing?!! Yes, what is wrong with that – it’s just the same with your banks, telcos, insurance companies and any other large conglomerates.

It’s all offshore – not literally, maybe.

In short, not on your infrastructure, not managed by you and no overheads so to speak. Just pay the subscription fees by the month or whatever is on offer and you are ready to go!  It’s all hosted for you! Read the rest of this entry »