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After a recent farm migration, a number of content databases were left offline. This had the unintended consequence of not allowing user profile synchronization to occur across site collections (where the content databases were offline).

The quick fix? Bring the content database(s) online.

The moral of the story? Do not leave your content database(s) offline without a good reason. If you do leave them offline, User Information Lists in the offline site collections will not be synchronized with the SSP.

When upgrading from a standard SKU to an Enterprise SKU in SharePoint (MOSS 2007), things can (and do) go wrong. Come to think of it, I’ve never seen one complete successfully without some type of manual intervention. Fortunately, the majority of errors that are experienced are recoverable. Take for instance:

An existing request to enable the Enterprise feature is in progress. To check the status of this request, go to the Timer Job Status page in Central Administration Operations and check the status of the Office Server Enterprise Features Upgrade Job.

When you find the job in the Timer Job Status page, you will see that it needs to run on all servers in your farm. Chances are it has failed on one (or more) servers. The quick fix? Restart (or start if stopped) the Windows SharePoint Services Timer service on the server where the upgrade job failed. After the job has completed, return to Central Administration to verify that your farm has been upgraded.

One of my pain points as a SharePoint “administrator” is having to deal with deployments of solution packages to my environment without the best change management. This means that I often see packages making their way in to the environment without any thought given to keeping the package in case it needs to be reapplied at a later time (Note: I’m not the only one who controls what goes into the environment).

The solution? I whipped up a Windows application so download one, several, or all of the solution packages currently stored in the farm configuration database.

I have posted the application to CodePlex @ http://spsolutiondownloader.codeplex.com/.

The application must be run in the context of a Farm Administrator (i.e. right-click, Run As…) on a server in the farm for which you wish to download the solution package(s) from and requires the .NET Framework 3.5.

I would love some feedback from the community as to whether or not this useful. I have some other little apps in mind I could put together with the proper motivation.

SPTraceView (by Hristo Pavlov) is a tool which allows a user (with console and/or RDP access to a SharePoint server) to view the trace logs for SharePoint in real time. Parsing through ULS logs can be a tedious process, but being able to see the events as they occur certainly makes it much more palatable.

SPTraceView can be used in either a single server or a farm scenario, although a farm does require some configuration.