The dreaded 'An error has occurred' message during SPS Install

I have never had this happen to me, but last week one of my colleagues had a monkey on his back when he was trying to install SharePoint Portal Server. The install failed at the point when the Configuration database was being created with 'an error has occurred'. To troubleshoot the problem I got him to install SQL Client Utilities onto the box (which he should have anyway to ensure the SharePoint Backup/Restore works properly) and then try to create a new database on the remote server. This failed. In the end we found that for some reason, the Model database in SQL was set to Single user mode and the dba was using that connection. Once we deleted his connection and set it back to Multiuser, the install worked without a hitch.

Ever wondered how to increase the size of the My Site Photo?

I had a customer the other week that wanted everyone's My Site photo to appear a little larger (so that vision impaired people could see it easier). Out of the box, SharePoint sets the maximum photo size to 100 x 100. If a photo is only 50 x 50, then it still gets rendered at 50 x 50 because SharePoint does not stretch an image to be larger than its original size. The average size of the photos that my customer was uploading to the Staff Image library was 300 x 200. SharePoint would shrink this image to be around the 100 x 66 resolution. To fix it, I modified public.aspx, which exists in the My Site template (C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\60\TEMPLATE\1033\SPSMSITE). I changed the text from:


<table cellspacing=0 cellpadding=0 style="table-layout: fixed" width="100" id="tablePictureUrl">
<tr id="PictureUrlImage_TR" height="100"><td id="ProfileViewer_ValuePictureUrl" valign=top align=right>
<SPSWC:ProfilePropertyImage PropertyName="PictureUrl" ResizeToFit="100" ShowPlaceholder="true" id="PictureUrlImage" runat="server" />
</td></tr>
</table>

to:

<table cellspacing=0 cellpadding=0 style="table-layout: fixed" width="300" id="tablePictureUrl">
<tr id="PictureUrlImage_TR" height="300"><td id="ProfileViewer_ValuePictureUrl" valign=top align=right>
<SPSWC:ProfilePropertyImage PropertyName="PictureUrl" ResizeToFit="300" ShowPlaceholder="true" id="PictureUrlImage" runat="server" />
</td></tr>
</table>

Quite simple really, changing '100' to '300'.

Problems with running SPS install via Terminal Services

A colleague of mine ran into some problems last week while trying to install SharePoint at a customer site. They were connecting to a VM Ware instance via terminal services (mstsc) and were getting a VB runtime error whenever they tried to run setup.exe. After a couple of frustrating hours we realised that in order to run the install you had to be connected to the console session. The syntax therefore should be mstsc -v:servername /F -console where mstsc is the Remote Desktop connection executable file, -v indicates a server to connect to, /F indicates full screen mode, and -console is the instruction to connect to the console session.

Welcome

Well I never thought that I would see the day when I would succumb to blogging. I view people's blogs all the time, but rarely find time to work on one myself.

Who am I?

Well I'm the Australian National Manager for Collaboration & Workflow solutions for Strategic Data Management, a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner with offices in Melbourne, Adelaide and Sydney. Although I am a techo at heart, I also do a lot of sales & marketing related work, including client demos, creation of marketing material and bid work; oh yes - don't we love that bid work :-(.

As I specialise in all things Information Worker (and Business Process Automation), I will use this blog to post useful information that I have found around the traps. Hope you enjoy!