Monday, March 22, 2010

What is Quiesce ?

What in God's name is Quiesce???No, Quiesce doesn't mean the same user online can't do anything or a new user can't access the SharePoint site.
I have collated the following information and hopefully this will help you to understand how Quiesce works.
Quiescing comes into the limelight especially where long running sessions are required. Not all features in your portal environment are affected when you Quiesce your farm. There are two primary features that make use of Quiescing: Microsoft Office InfoPath Forms Services (IPFS) and Microsoft Office Excel Services. Many other features and operations do not need to use Quisecing because they do not have long running sessions where users enter data over multiple server requests without having to save information. For instance, when editing an item in a SharePoint list, SharePoint handles that in a single transaction to the database, storing the information, so no Quiescing needed here.
However, in IPFS, a form filling session may require several communications with a server as the form posts back for server-side data processing for operations such as view switching. Data from the session is usually not saved until the very end when a user submits or saves the form that he or she is filling. Voila!!! Quiescing comes into the picture here.
If an administrator takes the farm offline while some users were already filling it out, the users would lose all of the data they have been trying to input so far in their session and you would be recieving lot of HATE MAIL in your inbox for doing this ;-)
Therefore, if an administrator is going to bring the farm offline, in order to preserve their customer data, they would make a plan of action and first quiesce the farm. This prevents new requests from coming in to start filling out new forms, but it allows existing form filling sessions to continue. When the sessions are all completed, or when an administrator-specified time elapses, the farm enters the quiesced state where no new requests are accepted. The farm can then be safely taken offline at this point without causing any data loss for users and lets be fair, you gave a fair deal of time for end users to fill in thier data in thier forms.
Hope this was helpful.

Thursday, March 11, 2010

Trivia Quiz

Identify and tell what is the significance of this temple in the great Indian Politics.

Recuperating Lost Collab Documents

Seldom does everything work out fine in life. It might so happen that one fine day you wake up and you find that some how something screwed up and some of your collab projects have done a dissapearing act. And for some reasons which sometimes even the mighty Oracle analysts is not able to find, the documents in the collab projects have been lost. How to restore them back to the working environment?

Solution:

The deleted files can be restored back to the production environment by using the migration utility of Plumtree.

1. Restore the backup of the production portal and collab database for that particular date in the "Recovery" environment as well as also the "PTDR" folder. "PTDR" folder is actually the repository for all the collab documents.
2. Configure the Portal in the "Recovery" environment for the restored portal and the collab database.
3. Once steps 1 and 2 is completed, Test the portal to be functioning similar to the Production environment since all the related files and database have been restored.
4. Using the migration utility of the Plumtree portal, select the Projects which have lost their files and opt for the "export "option.
Once you initiate the migration utility, what it does is it creates an export file which can be imported to any other portal environment.
5. On successful execution of Step 4, Log into the migration utility of the Target (Production in this case) portal environment and select the "Import" option. That will import the collab project details back to the target environment.
6. As a crosscheck measure, log into the target portal and check the collab project for the lost files. If they are present then everything is in order. If not then need to proceed further to Step 7.
7. This step can be carried out after completion of step 1 and 2. Query the Collab database in these tables [CSFOLDERS][CSFILES][CSFILEHISTORY] to figure out the deleted files based on the inputs from the user/business as to what all files or projects have been affected.
On querying the tables, detailed information about the Projects and their corresponding documents can be obtained such as which is the Parent folder for the Project and also the different versions of the document.
8. Based on the information procured on step 7 with reference to the lost files, open windows explorer and access the "PTDR\ documents\PTCollab\Active" from the recovery environment and copy the

Note: People please do take full backups of "PTDR" folder (D:/Plumtree/ptdr) from the environment wherein the documents have been deleted along with a complete backup of the SQL database for the Collab server ("Collabdb" – from the source environment).

Saturday, March 6, 2010

Trivia Quiz


Identify the person who made an iconic contribution to the Desi Television history!

Friday, March 5, 2010

ALUI Publisher Diagnostic Page

Personally I hate Publisher and I am looking forward to work on Stelliant and do pray its better and easier than Publisher.

I am sure most of you must have felt the need of some sort of diagnostic page where you can get to diagnose the problems facing your ALUI Publisher. I know all of us use the "Publisher Administrator” portlet but there are some rare occasions when Publisher Administrator is not accessible. Now what do you do? SLA time is creeping upon you and you need to get it resolved ASAP.

Well worry not, ALUI does have a way out for all of us.

Aqualogic Publisher’s diagnostic page can be accessed through the “Publisher Administrator” portlet, or you can go directly to its URL: http://publisherservername:7087/ptcs/console/index.jsp.