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!

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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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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This is continuation of the blog post series on Reimaging SharePoint VMs on the fly.

Quick recap: In the earlier post, we have created a vhd and enabled the vhd to be bootable.

In this post, I am now logged into the vhd and ready to prepare my virtual machine for installing SharePoint 2010. Read the rest of this entry »

This is one feature you are likely to disable sooner or later. Very recently I saw the first template pop up in SharePoint when you click on More Options to create content.

Back in the days when SharePoint 2010 was in beta and I happened to be at the Ignite Training in Bangalore, I had come across few features that I wanted to disable – for fun!

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Yes, it’s coming! If you haven’t heard, read then here is the repeat of the buzz… SharePoint Service Pack 1 is expected to be released in late June, 2011!

I am interested in this service pack more then ever, for a reason – self service recovery of site collections and sites! As a site collection administrator, if your user has deleted a site what options do you have to recover them?

If you have a recent backup (which you would) and on-site (which you should not) then out of the box you can recover the site from an unattached content database… but that’s going to cost – time and resources. Read the rest of this entry »