World Cup 3 - SharePoint Support

What do the England football team and SharePoint have in common? The answer is they both need support. I suppose if we hadn’t beaten Solvenia last night the answer could have been very different. Mind you it is possible that by the time you read this posting England have been knocked out of the World Cup (hopefully not after losing on penalties to the Germans) or maybe even the record breaking tennis game on court 18 might even have finished.

The support England have had in South Africa has been immense and during the vital last group game they even made more noises than the vuvuzela.

Many companies seem happy to invest money in implementing SharePoint but then gamble by not having support. SharePoint is quite an easy to maintain system, but things do go wrong so it is best to think about Support. If you use a SharePoint Consultancy like Office Talk then it is worth asking what kind of support options they offer. Alternatively make sure that somebody in IT has completed a SharePoint Administration training course so they know the kind of problems you can encounter with your SharePoint.

When troubleshooting SharePoint there are four places you should be aware of on each of the SharePoint Servers. These are;

1. Application Event Log – Are there any red errors and if so when did they start? The description of the Error will often indicate where the problem is and frequently it might indicate that SharePoint cannot connect to the database. Don’t panic it might just be that somebody is rebooting the SQL Server.

2. Services – In Control Panel – Administrative Tools – Services check that none of the automatic services have stopped especially any SharePoint or Database ones. It is also worth stopping and starting the SharePoint Timer Service. If any services are hung and say ‘Stopping’ or ‘starting’ it is best to restart the server so that they can fully stop.

3. SQL Database – If you have SQL Manager then check on the state of the database and if possible take the SharePoint database offline then bring it back online. Even if you are using the inbuilt SharePoint database it is useful to install SQL Manager to allow you to manage the database.

4. IIS Manger – Check on the IIS Manager that the website listed for SharePoint and the Application Pool it is associated with are both ‘started’. If one says ‘stopped’ then try starting it. It is also worth using the command iisreset from the Command-Line Prompt.

So as you support England, or your own country, during this World Cup think about how well supported your SharePoint system is. Also and probably even more important is, how good is your SharePoint backup? If disaster strikes how easy would it be to rebuild your SharePoint and how quickly would you may be able to access all your data again? Make sure you either have the latest SharePoint Agent with your Veritas Backup Exec or invest in a third-party SharePoint backup solution like AvePoint’s DocAve . Remember your information is only as good as your last backup.

After I correctly predicted Germany 0 Serbia 1 last week I am going to predict the four quarter-finals now which you might note does not include the boys from Brazil.

South Korea v USA
Netherlands v Spain
Argentina v England
Paraguay v Portugal

Please let me know what you think of my predictions.
Now it is time to prepare myself for the tense job of supporting England. I just hope they have been practising those penalty kicks just in case.

Come on England !!!