Show OS info on Desktop
How to display the Operating System information on Desktop (without using a 3rd party tool):
Key : HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop
Value : PaintDesktopVersion
Data : 1 or 0 (1 – OS Version is enabled ; 2 – disabled)
Type : REG_DWORD
May 5, 2009
· 
Rahul Desai · 
No Comments
Posted in: General, Tools, Tips & Utilities
"An exception of type system.security.principal.identitynotmappedexception was thrown" – SharePoint
Sharing my trouble shooting experience with SharePoint. I was running the SharePoint configuration wizard after a issue being report by a user, issue was:
Failed to register SharePoint services.
Error message: "An exception of type System.Security.Principal.IdentityNotMappedException was thrown. Additional exception information: Some or all identity references could not be translated."
After some investigation discovered that the "SharePoint Central Administration v3"- Application Pool – in IIS had the wrong username and password configured in the Identity tab (must be result of username / password change). Fixed that, restarted the App Pool, ran the SharePoint wizard again and it all got resolved!
Referring to the SharePoint manual, the problem could also have been resolved by using
"stsadm.exe -o updatefarmcredentials -userlogin -password".
Now in my records….
May 5, 2009
· Rahul Desai · No Comments
Posted in: SharePoint, Tools, Tips & Utilities
Reboot required check SQL Server 2008 and SP1 – "Restart Computer" – Failed
When installing SQL Server 2008 one can run into “‘Reboot required check’ failed” situation.
After seeing it few times already, I think a solution is worth keeping in records.
When you view the detailed report, it says:
“Why don’t you just reboot?”, you say… Well, most likely it would not help you, but try it first.
If this would not help, then try the following:
May 5, 2009
· Rahul Desai · No Comments
Posted in: Blogroll, Personal, SQL Server, Tools, Tips & Utilities
Microsoft SharePoint Designer available as a free download
Exciting and great news for SharePoint developers…read link below:
SharePoint Designer available as a free download
April 21, 2009
· Rahul Desai · No Comments
Posted in: SharePoint
Installing Virtual Server 2005 on Vista SP1 – (Ultimate)
It all started with the error "Installing the virtual server administration web site required IIS world wide web service to be installed and the IIS admin service to be running…..", and I spent most of my Sunday, trying to get Virtual Server running on Vista.
After lot of Google(ing) and trial and error, here is what was required:
Step 1: Enable IIS and the required features:
By default Vista doesn’t install Internet Information Server (IIS), even if you are running the Ultimate edition.
Adding it is pretty simple, go to Control Panel and choose the option to “Turn Windows features On or Off”, select the IIS feature and enable it.
If you just turn IIS on, the default options, that get enabled with IIS, do not have all the features you need to run Virtual Server. The options required are as below (highlighted in green):
Step 2: Successfully install the Virtual Server:
Before you install IIS and enable the appropriate required features (as above), Virtual Server won’t install properly. Well, you can install it, but without the web administrator console access, and without the web console you won’t be able to:
- Create new Virtual Machine(s) and / or
- Be able to use your existing virtual machine due to lack of access rights
Anyway, once IIS is installed and configured with the settings as above, Virtual Server will install successfully.
Step 3: Some more settings required through IIS manager before you get it right:
If you try running the web administration console after the above you’ll get the following error:
This is because of the ISAPI and CGI Restriction list settings on the Web server. Running executables in IIS can give rise to quite a few security issues, so by default IIS won’t do it.
Change this configuration by going to the IIS information services manager. In the Feature View for the root level, there is an option to modify ISAPI and CGI restrictions (as below):
Right click on ISAPI and CGI restrictions and select "Open Feature", on the next screen again right click and select “Edit Feature Settings” and Allow unspecified CGI and ISAPI modules (as below):
I referred many articles online and most of them had warnings like:
- "You’re blowing an enormous hole in IIS’ security with this sort of changes".
- "It should be done only on a development machine, and by no means on a production box".
- etc…
All valid and acceptable, any ideas what would you do if you need to do it on a production box? Would Microsoft like to comment here?
Step 4: The last but not the least:
The virtual server administration web site won’t run correctly unless the "Browser" is run as an Administrator (standard Vista requirement in most cases).
Nice experience…but not a good way to spend your Sunday…
December 9, 2008
· Rahul Desai · No Comments
Posted in: General, Tools, Tips & Utilities
Top 15 technology start-ups- Indiatimes Infotech
Geneva-based World Economic Forum (WEF) honours Tech Pioneers IT companies for their accomplishments as innovators of the highest caliber, and whose technologies will have a deep impact on business and society…..read more at:
Top 15 technology start-ups- Indiatimes Infotech
December 8, 2008
· Rahul Desai · No Comments
Posted in: General
RD is now PMP certified…
I just passed the PMP certification exam yesterday. Overall, it was a good experience going through the whole learning process.
October 8, 2008
· Rahul Desai · No Comments
Posted in: Personal, Project Management, Training
SharePoint implementation – Some key issues to consider#4 – Plan for migration of existing contents
Continuing from the last few posts (SharePoint implementation – Some key issues to consider#3 – Who accesses what and with what privileges? , SharePoint implementation – Some key issues to consider#2 – What to Store and what to avoid? and SharePoint implementation – Some key issues to consider#1 – Estimating and keeping track of storage), I would want to share my experience with migrating existing contents to SharePoint.
We had quiet a few hick-ups here, including identifying and implementing:
- The contents to be moved
- The editing, version control etc.. strategies
- Setting up the application with which each document is opened with
- Sending information to concerned owners when a document changes……..
- and many more…
but the important one that I would describe here is migrating the Public shared folders from Outlook to SharePoint. Some of the key requirements were:
- Classifying the shared content to the classified folders on SharePoint (i.e quotes going to quotes folder in SharePoint etc…)
- Ensuring appropriate privileges assigned on SharePoint for accessing the shared contents
- Automating the process, in a way that, whenever a new document is created in Shared Folder, it automatically gets created in SharePoint
Well, there is a feature in SharePoint where in you can link a document space with outlook and then drag and drop your document from Shared folder, but due to security and rights issues, the feature was not working for Microsoft Exchange ( or may be Outlook) shared folder contents, we did quiet a bit of research on this, including evaluating different tools, and conclusively, we were able to achieve it by using a third party tool called Colligo Contributor Pro from Colligo Networks. It is a pretty good tool to have on your shelf for the price of it (…you would be amazed when you actually look at the price!!!!), I would not go through the whole list of features offered by the product (it is already available on their web site), but I would sincerely recommend to use this tool rather than wasting your time in trying to find out a solution for migrating document to SharePoint.
We were still not able to achieve the classification of the contents as per the folders in SharePoint (automatically), but once the contents were on SharePoint, it was not difficult to classify it to the required folders using the “Explorer view”.
Next I will be sharing my experience with backup and restore within SharePoint….
August 5, 2008
· Rahul Desai · No Comments
Posted in: SharePoint, Talman news
SharePoint implementation – Some key issues to consider#3 – Who accesses what and with what privileges?
Continuing from my last few posts SharePoint implementation – Some key issues to consider#1 – Estimating and keeping track of storage and SharePoint implementation – Some key issues to consider#2 – What to Store and what to avoid? , the next issue I would want to share is who accesses what and with what privileges?
In this age of governance and compliance, security awareness, and risk management, few things are more critical than controlling access to applications and information. This is especially critical in the free-wheeling world of SharePoint, where those setting up their own sites are apt to be unfamiliar with good security practices, and when, frankly, security is not really part of their job. Here are some of the things you have to worry about as a SharePoint administrator:
- How new employees / contractors are made part of the SharePoint group – and what are their permissions within their group
- How to keep employees from accessing another group’s information – information they have no right to see
- How to ensure proper version control and editing rights are allocated
How to handle employees who are:
- leaving their group
- transferring to a new position / department, or
- leaving the company entirely
Most organizations have established governance policies that cover these and other scenarios, and as SharePoint administrator, it is your task to enforce these policies. You need to be able to:
- Centrally set permissions
- Grant users’ permissions to one or more SharePoint site collections or sites, either directly or as a member of an existing group
- You need to be able to centrally delete permissions
- and so on…
It really took us a while to decide and implement decisions related to privileges….and last but not least..one good feature which helps in the process…..anyone can ask / request for a permission to site or site collections through the “Request Access” feature, so you can gradually build up the access and privilege list (after initial setup).
This was a critical planning task for us as we had to plan right from the top (site level) till bottom (document level).
July 30, 2008
· Rahul Desai · No Comments
Posted in: SharePoint, Talman news
SharePoint implementation – Some key issues to consider#2 – What to Store and what to avoid?
In one of the previous post SharePoint implementation – Some key issues to consider#1 – Estimating and keeping track of storage , I was discussing my SharePoint storage experience, continuing from there, how best to decide what to store and what to avoid?
Firstly, looking at some of the main goals of SharePoint implementation (for the first phase which was collaboration related to documentation) across various division:
- Have information related to various products, company activities and knowledge base articles (internal forums, product manuals, procedure manual etc…) stored some where for easy access
- Have all the documents from various team members, file severs and other location stored on a centralised place, so that it is easily available and not lost because of what ever reason
- Develop and implement some sort of common documentation standards as far as creating, maintaining and sharing documents across Talman divisions is concerned
So keeping the above basic goals in mind, we developed the following strategy:
- Have a individual storage space for individual division
- Have a common storage space for the whole of Talman team
- Dump all the existing documentation into the respective storage spaces without analysing into depths
- Appoint and assign a librarian for each storage space (which in our case was divisional managers)
- The librarian analyses (in conjunction with other divisional manages and of course division members) the storage categories and defines procedures for their respective storage space, which in term complies with the overall organisation goals
- The librarian re-organises the existing documents gradually
- The librarian trains and propagates the same as part of the overall organisation procedures
All of the above was done over a period of time and involved numerous meetings and discussion, but the key was, instead of deciding what type of documents to store we worked on the divisional needs (considering each division has their own document storing and sharing needs).
The next question to answer was who accesses what and with what privileges?…in my next post.
July 25, 2008
· Rahul Desai · No Comments
Posted in: SharePoint, Talman news