Archive for May, 2008
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ACCESSIBILITY – Making MOSS Accessible
by Andy on May 14th, 2008
During the past few months I’ve been working with my current client to identify the best methods for making MOSS more accessible for visually impaired end users. This has presented many challenges with screen reading technology (my client currently uses JAWS and Dolphin’s SuperNova).
I have been using HiSoftware’s AKS (Accessibility Kit for SharePoint) version 1.1. for the past few weeks and as such took the opportunity to meet AKS at the ‘Building Accessible Web Sites Using Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 and the Accessibility Kit for SharePoint’ session (hosted by HiSoftware and Microsoft) last April at Microsoft’s London Victoria offices.
As I haven’t had time to intensely study the kit (yet) I learnt from the session that rather than using the AKS templates (which are basically rewritten [bland] SharePoint CSS master pages), I should be looking at extracting code snips from the master pages and incorporating them into my own customised master page…….expect more blogging on this when I’ve arrived at this item within my MS Project Plan.
In the meantime the Slidedeck for Accessibility Kit for SharePoint, used at SPC2008, can be found on the Microsoft SharePoint blog here
Tags: Accessibility
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ALTER DATABASE - Access Options
by Andy on May 14th, 2008
Last night I restored a database and upon completion I found it to be in ‘Restricted User’ mode on the tree in SSMS 2005. Having been too used to SQL 2000 Enterprise Manager rather than SSMS (and given that I was working into my 12th hour of the day!) I couldn’t recall how to remove the restriction, so here’s a brief explanation of the different access options and how to quickly change this within SSMS:
SINGLE_USER - Only a single user can be in the database at a time.
RESTRICTED_USER – This is the same as the old dbo use only setting. Only users in the db_owner role (or sysadmin role) can use the database when this value is set.
MULTI_USER - Normal access and any user with any access to the database can use the database.
For some settings (including these user access options,) you can specify a termination clause which will terminate connections to the database (other than the one executing the command) before changing the setting.
Also, if you want to set the database to read only (or back to read write,) you can use READ_ONLY and READ_WRITE.
How to set:
Right click database name > Properties > Options (from Select a page) > State (bottom of the list) > Restrict Access > here you can select your choice.
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How to Kill All Processes That Have Open Connection in a SQL Server 2005 Database
by Andy on May 8th, 2008
Most SharePoint folks with at some point need to take their SharePoint databases offline (especially for development and test environments).
However, it’s quite common for one of more of your databases to ‘appear’ to be in process of going offline which may eventually fail.
If this happens to you then it’s more than likely that you have connections that require dropping. In SQL 2000 you would receive a prompt to drop all connections before taking a database offline, but not in SQL 2005.
The quickest way I found to drop all database connections and take the database offline is to [a] Place the database into Single User Mode [here's my related article on this] and then [b] run the following T-SQL (be careful with the inverted commas!):
USE master
go
DECLARE @dbname sysname
SET @dbname = ‘name of database you want to drop connections from’
DECLARE @spid int
SELECT @spid = min(spid) from master.dbo.sysprocesses where dbid = db_id(@dbname)
WHILE @spid IS NOT NULL
BEGIN
EXECUTE (’KILL ‘ + @spid)
SELECT @spid = min(spid) from master.dbo.sysprocesses where dbid = db_id(@dbname) AND spid > @spid
END
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Issues uninstalling MOSS 2007
by Andy on May 1st, 2008
I came across an issue today as I couldn’t remove SharePoint Server 2007 installation. You’d think ‘pretty simple hey?’
I found that the uninstaller simply quit without any prompt or message, and after some trial and error I found you have to do the following:
1. Remove Server From Farm :: Central Admin > Operations tab > Server in farm > Remove server. You may see an error message after you click remove, as the server can’t render the page anymore.
2. Remove Databases :: Content DB, Config, Search, SSP, Etc.
3. Remove Web Applications :: Via IIS Management Console, remove all web applications related to the MOSS site.
You’re ready to try removing MOSS again via add/remove programs.