SharePoint and Special Characters

Ok, this some of these issues I always know the basics but there come a time that I need to delve into the details...

As all of you time is always an issue so I expect to have a few edits on this topic...
The clients I consult to is mostly on SP2010 at the moment so that is what im basing my research on...SP2013 with Fast search might be similar.

At the time of this pose SP2016 announcements are coming out and apparently documents will have some kind of id, so you can move it around without breaking links....Lets hope they use this ID in the URL to get rid of some of the issues with log file names.

SharePoint Foundation is different to the other versions.

Good read:
http://www.networkworld.com/article/2222853/microsoft-subnet/10-essential-sharepoint-search-hints.html

Bottom Line:
What should I use in my SharePoint File Name:
Underscore "_"

What Should I Not use in my file names:

Hyphen "-" (Can cause other issues, see Susans Post below for details)

Do not Smush words together without separator. (Search wont recognise the words)

Then there is a bunch that is not allowed (They will be blocked by SharePoint)

All I need for now...This topic seems to have allot of opinions....Susans post above had the best detail I could find in the topic so for now I am going with her recommendation.

Cheers for now

Test and Troubleshoot mail with PowerShell

Hi,

The old way was with Telnet
http://daniecsp.blogspot.com/2013/06/sending-test-mail-with-telnet.html

Bit easyer with PowerShell:

Send-Mailmessage -To Destination@domain.com -From Source@domain.com -Subject testing -Body testing -SmtpServer OURSERVER

One thing I'm not sure yet is how the error reporting works but usually PowerShell is pretty good.

SP2010: List Column Limits

Hi,

Have not been very busy on the Blog the last few month's...
Moved down to Cape Town in a Architect role so not involved in all the deep technical trouble shooting anymore.

So from a Architect point of view i found this very handy.

How many column's can i have in a list?
You have a different size value per column. Should not exceed 8000.

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc262787%28v=office.14%29.aspx#Column

For rough calculations the max bytes value per column is 56 bytes for a Hyperlink or Pic so use that x columns

SharePoint 2010 DPM 2010 Backups - How to be sure i am backing up everything

Hi,

Usually i have to look for supporting articles and get some info here ad there....With this post it is all there...

http://blogs.technet.com/b/dpm/archive/2010/05/10/how-to-be-sure-that-your-sharepoint-farm-is-fully-protected.aspx

Nice Job Chris Butcher, all the detail in one post.

Deleting a Service Application with Power Shell

Hi,

Here is how to delete a service app with Power Shell

Run

$spapp = Get-SPServiceApplication -Name "<Service application display name>"

Then to keep the data

Remove-SPServiceApplication $spapp
Or remove Data
Remove-SPServiceApplication $spapp -RemoveData

More details

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee806875(v=office.14).aspx

If the above does not work you can try this command(Dirty Method):

stsadm -o deleteconfiguratio nobject -id <ID>

Where you can change "<id>" to $spapp (Suppose to, did not test it) 

you can also run get-SPServiceApplication for a list.

SharePoint 2013 Managed Metadata Service KeyNotFoundException

Hi,

Getting this error on a SharePoint 2013 farm when trying to access term store:

Failed to get term store for proxy 'Managed Metadata Service'. Exception: System.Collections.Generic.KeyNotFoundException: The given key was not present in the dictionary.

Looks like the most common way to solve this is to recreate your managed metadata.

I did a little investigation. And nothing worked.

At the end i just recreated it...

Be sure to have a backup.

Detach The metadata DB
Delete and then recreate the managed metadata service application.
Attach the old DB and in the metadata settings point to it.

Test SQL IO Performance

Hi,

Here is how to test your SQL IO Performance. This basically just test your hard drive IO so don't actually have anything to do with SQL.
Download SQLIO
http://www.microsoft.com/en-za/download/details.aspx?id=20163

Then install it on the SQL Server
Browse to it in command prompt as Administrator.

*****Do no do this on Production*****

Now for the default test you can just type in SQLIO but that wont help you much, you want to specify your different hard drives in your SQL Server, change the file size ex...
This will better explain it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aF2_rmyrbLU

Here is a good article i got most of my info from:
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/sqlmeditation/archive/2013/04/04/choosing-what-sqlio-tests-to-run-and-automating-sqlio-testing-somewhat.aspx

Copy and Paste from the MSDN blog for easy ref for myself so all credit to Joseph

1. Create 2 Param.txt files in the SQLIO folder. One that uses a single thread and one that uses multiple threads. Call them ParamST.txt and ParamMT.txt

ParamST.txt contents might look like this: G:\testfile.dat 1 0x0 500

ParamMT.txt contents might look like this: G:\testfile.dat 8 0x0 500

2. Copy the text below and paste it into a text file.

echo ****** Read Tests *****

sqlio -kR -s300 -frandom -o8 -b8 -LS -FparamMT.txt > Reads8KRandom8Oustanding.txt
timeout /T 10
sqlio -kR -s300 -frandom -o8 -b64 -LS -FparamMT.txt > Reads64KRandom8Oustanding.txt
timeout /T 10
sqlio -kR -s300 -frandom -o8 -b512 -LS -FparamMT.txt > Reads512KRandom8Oustanding.txt
timeout /T 10

echo ****** Write Tests *****

sqlio -kW -s300 -frandom -o8 -b8 -LS -FparamMT.txt > Writes8KRandom8Outstanding.txt
timeout /T 10
sqlio -kW -s300 -frandom -o100 -b256 -LS -FparamST.txt > Writes256KRandom100Outstanding.txt
timeout /T 10
sqlio -kW -s300 -frandom -o200 -b256 -LS -FparamST.txt > Writes256KRandom200Outstanding.txt

2. Then save the text file as SQLIOTest.bat in the folder that contains SQLIO.EXE and you are ready to go

3. Just run SQLIOTest.bat from Command Prompt

Now to analyse the data:

You can do something like this and parse the data into excel...I am not going to do that.
http://sqlblog.com/blogs/jonathan_kehayias/archive/2010/05/25/parsing-sqlio-output-to-excel-charts-using-regex-in-powershell.aspx

As far as i can gather from some research(Correct me if im wrong), the important info in the reports is the IOPS and MB/sec. The idea is to run this before you make a change and then again after you finished to see what the performance penalty is.

Hope this it helpful!