Awarded Microsoft MVP for the 4th year in a row!

For the past three years, July 1st has a special meaning to me, and it’s always a day that starts full of expectations and anxiety, which lasts until the moment of receiving the so expected e-mail from Microsoft.

Fortunately, today I was once again awarded by Microsoft with the “Most Valuable Professional” award, now for the fourth time in a row in the SHAREPOINT SERVER category.

Below is an excerpt of the well known message I received a few hours ago, together with more details about the MVP award:

"Congratulations! We are pleased to present you with the 2013 Microsoft MVP Award! This award is given to exceptional technical community leaders who actively share their high quality, real world expertise with others. We appreciate your outstanding contributions in SharePoint Server technical communities during the past year"

I’m truly humbled by this award; grateful to Microsoft and to everyone that have been supporting me in my professional and personal growth. THANK YOU!

USB drive stopped working in Windows Server 2012

Issue: USB Drive suddenly stopped working in Windows Server 2012.

Error: There was no error as such, however, whenever we tried to attach any USB drive it was not detected.

Background: I recently installed Windows Server 2012 Enterprises Edition my machine. I kept it connected to internet with automatic download and install Windows update option. Next day when I wake-up and tried to connect my USB drive or the USB Mass storage Device. None of them was detected.

Troubleshooting:

Checked in the device manager all the drives for USB Controller Bus were in place.

Noticed that Mass storage controller device were missing.

 

 

 

Thinking this may be the problem, tried installing the Mass storage controller derives from Local O.S set-up.

Tried installing derives from internet also, however, no go.

Resolution:

Found a KB article from MS talking of the same issue and was published by MS on April 26, 2013.

Article goes by this: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2821819.

To resolve this issue, install the Windows 8 and Windows Server 2012 cumulative update 2822241.

For more information about how to obtain this cumulative update package, access the following article number below to view the article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:

Windows 8 and Windows Server 2012 cumulative update: April 2013: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2822241.

Another workaround:

Go to Control Panel.

Click Windows Updated.

Click View update history.

Click on “To remove an update, see Installed Updates”.

It will take you to the next screen, “Uninstall an update”.

Choose to click each update recently installed on the machine and uninstall them.

Restart your server, your USB Device should be detected now.

Note: Always set you Windows update settings to “Check for updates but let me choose whether to download and install them”. As shown in the fig. below.

 

Applies to:

•Windows 8

•Windows 8 Enterprise

•Windows 8 Pro

•Windows Server 2012 Datacenter

•Windows Server 2012 Essentials

•Windows Server 2012 Foundation

•Windows Server 2012 Standard

Phases of SharePoint Transition Plan: SharePoint 2010

Dear readers as stated in my last article, today I am going to discuss on components of transition plan. First we will discuss about the Transition plan.

What is a transition planning?

To make sure service transitions projects are planned in accordance with the organization's Project Management guidelines, and to coordinate activities and resources across projects. Executing these activities in an organized structured way is called Transition Plan.

This process is not responsible for detailed planning of project phases but triggers planning activities performed by other processes. 

There could be two kinds of Transition Plans: 

High level Plan: Consist of the overview layout of the transitions Plan with timelines of all the phases of the transition plan. 

Detailed level Plan: Consist of detailed information with each activity of each phase along with the time in days each activity will take.  

Let’s discuss Phases of Transition Plan in Details: 

Planning Phase: This phase involves the initial Planning of appropriate capacity and resources to package a release, build, release, test, deploy and establish the new or changed service into production. Provide support for the Service Transition teams and people. Plan the changes required in a manner that ensures the integrity of all identified customer assets, service assets and configurations can be maintained as they evolve through Service Transition, Ensure that Service Transition issues, risks and deviations are reported to the appropriate stakeholders and decision makers.

KAP Phase: Knowledge acquisition phase can make or break a project. Experts refer to that phase of project when they start it, and when knowledge is acquired from either client or vendor, as Knowledge acquisition phase. The success of knowledge acquisition lies in understanding and monitoring it quantitatively. Successful technology use (Web 2.0, video /audio etc.) is also an important element.

Secondary Support Phase: At this phase of transition, we basically observe what we acquire in the knowledge acquisition phase. We hold the responsibility to detect if there is any ambiguity in the knowledge acquired. This phase is also referred to as YOU DO WE OBSEVER.

Primary Support: In Primary support phase support team is partially take over functions of the Production support from the current teams or vendors. WE DO YOU OBSERVER approach is followed with this phase.

Production Support Go Live: After removing all ambiguities from the all the above phases at this phase Production Team will take over the complete support functions from the current teams or vendors. Here WE ARE RESPONSIBLE approach is followed.

Note: it is always important to have a checklist created at each phase of transition. These checklists could be Entry level check list and Exit Checklist. It is also important to get sign-off from the customer for audit evidences during the tractions phases.   

If you have any queries/questions regarding the above mentioned information then please let me know.

I would be more than happy to help you as well as resolves your issues, thank you.

Applies To: SharePoint 2010, SharePoint 2013.

What does it take to become Transition Manager: SharePoint 2010?

I have been busy to serve the requirement of one of our clients. Till now I have been working on the SharePoint Production/Operations and Maintenance support projects. This is first time I have been asked to take up the opportunity of a SharePoint Production support from another vendor to our client. 

I am learning allot of new things being on this assignments and I wish to share those concepts with all my readers.

When we talk about winning a deal with the client from our competitors, our bidding team come in to picture and based on the requirements of the client we need to project the solution to the client. This is point where a Solution Architect comes in to picture.  

When solution is projected to the client and accepted, then it comes to delivery part of the commitments made. These include SOW and SLA signoffs, Resource Planning, Budgeting, Resource Allocation; Technology Skill required etc. Delivery Manager (refer to the PDF at the link for details of a delivery mangers role) is basically responsible for all these things to carry forward. 

In between these roles an integral role also comes in the picture which needs to be carried by either a Program manager or a Transition Manager. 

Transition management (refer to the link for generic definition), in IT provides a powerful combination of technologies and standard operating procedures to drive the successful transfer and startup of a new service-delivery environment.

In other terms, Transition Management in IT is the planning, coordination and implementation of a change to the institutional investment structure.

For executing the transition of a technology based on a service model, you need an expert with the specific skill set termed as Transition Manager.  There are allot of expert with the specific skill set are available in the outside world. However, I can count myself lucky enough to take this opportunity being a Transition Manager. 

I will be focusing on some of the major components such as creating Transition plan, RACI Matrix, Skill Matrix, and Knowledge Acquisition Plan. 

Till then have a nice day….! 

Applies to: SharePoint 2010, SharePoint 2013.

SharePoint site are slow intermittently: SharePoint 2010.

Issue: We have been experiencing intermittent slowness on the SharePoint Farm.

Background: We are getting intermittent partial outage on the SharePoint Farm. We have assigned dedicated set of WFE’s for different set of web applications and all of sudden without any alert or alarming, user started reporting that SharePoint is taking long time to load or its keep on clocking. Lead time for the sites is min 3-5 min.

Troubleshooting:

We have checked if this issue is occurring for an individual user. It was happening for the large number of groups and people and not region specific.

We have checked on the specific server and sites are slow on the web servers as well.

We have checked on the SAAS, SCOM Alerts and Site Scope system from HP, however, no alert was triggered.

No blocking reported on the SQL server.

From server Event logs we only see an error message that “Cannot connect to SQL Server .”

Temporary Resolution: As a temporary resolution we had recycled the app pool on the webserver running that applications and it worked fine. However, I was not sure that there would be a huge service destruction coming in the next coming day.

You know what; this issue started occurring three to four times a day. And recycling app pool was not the correct choice always.

Permanent Resolution: So one day we have decided to involve the SQL Team as we see from the Event Logs that we get an Error message “Cannot connect to SQL ”.

Based on the MS analysis, we saw there were so many page latches on the TEMP DB by running the sys.dm_os_latch_stats and see what type of latches have increased contention and wait types, compared to previous base-line.

MS recommended splitting the 20 GB of Temp DB in smaller chunks. We divided Temp DB in 5 GB in size with 4 Databases on each SQL Server we have in the farm.

KB Article which support this resolution: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/307487.

Reference:

Diagnosing and Resolving Latch Contention on SQL Server: http://www.microsoft.com/en-in/download/details.aspx?id=26665

What is the temp Database: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms190768.aspx

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/15131021/sql-server-2005-investigate-what-caused-tempdb-to-grow-huge.

If you have any queries/questions regarding the above mentioned information then please let me know.

I would be more than happy to help you as well as resolves your issues, thank you.

Applies to:  SharePoint Foundation Server 2010, SharePoint 2010, SQL Server 2005 and SQL Server 2008.