Get your facts straight

Nothing irks me more than when some talking heads on TV is spouting off some opinions and then NOT using the right facts! A good example is California Congressman Adam Schiff who was on Fox and Friends (DirecTV channel 360) this morning. The topic up for debate was… of course… OIL. Anyway, the discussion was about the ban on offshore drilling for oil. Congressman Schiff was against offshore drilling and he noted, correctly I might add, that the US only has 1% to 3% of world oil reserve while we consume 25% of the world’s oil. Sneaky slight of hand there Congressman, but that’s not the question here, now is it? First the facts. Per the CIA World Fact Book:

	World Total	United States
Proven Oil Reserves	1,331,000 million bbl	21,760 million bbl (1.64%)
Oil Production	78.9 million bbl/day	8.322 million bbl/day (10.55%)
Oil Consumption	80.29 million bbl/day	20.8 million bbl/day (25.91%)

The real question is not related to oil reserves, but production instead. See, you cannot contrast reserves against consumption just to make a point when the question on the table is about production. What Congressman Schiff should have done was to use our production figures i.e. 10.55% instead. Instead, by contrasting reserves to consumption, it makes the cause look so much more hopeless and daunting. In his words “even IF we do this, we still only have 1 to 3 percent of the world’s oil.” True, but producing an addition 1 million bbl/day would reduce our reliance on foreign oil by no less than 8.01%. Now I agree that we consume way, way more oil than we produce. I agree we should reduce our dependence on foreign oil. I agree we can and should reduce our consumption, so please, no hate mail OK?  But reducing consumption AND increasing production together should be used to address the current energy crisis.

There are always three sides to every story. Your side, my side and the truth. In a society where most people take what they see on TV as truth and/or fact, all I ask is that if you’re going to be quoting numbers and figures, for Pete’s sake! Get your facts straight!!! 

Cheers
C

What the hell is going on with Google today?!

At first I thought it was just me having some WTF moments. I thought it could be my network… or my laptop… or a million other things… SURELY the great Google can’t be DOWN!!! Can it?

Apparently it seems that it can… at least from my perspective. As of about 8:30 EST this morning, I’ve been unable to reach www.google.com consistently and conducting any Google searches from the search toolbar has been spotty at best. Shoot, I can’t even do a Google search to see what the problem with Google might be!  This is now the 2^ndtime that I have personally experienced outages with Google’s services. The 1^st time was when the Google IMAP Server Cloud went down in April. I don’t mean to criticize, but when your product is depended on by millions around the world, it MUST be dependable! That means ZERO outage… EVER!!!

LIVE TO THE RESCUE!!! Luckily, Microsoft’s Live (www.live.com) search is still fully functional! Don’t you just LOVE having choices? Google down… no problem, just use Live!

As Raiders own put it (if he were in my shoes right now)… just Live baby! 

Cheers
C

Rating System for SharePoint documents

This is one of the most asked about questions that I get in the forums/newsgroups… how do I rate content within SharePoint? Now, Stephane Eyskens came up with a solution to this challenge. Check out his SharePoint Document Rating System project on Codeplex.

Cheers
C

How do I? – Change the Site Template of a root site collection that has sub sites

I was asked the following question in the support forums and thought it would be useful to blog about for others to use in the future.

Question: I created a new root site (site collection) and selected the wrong site template during the site creation process or I changed my mind and want to use a different site template than the one used during site creation. The problem is that sub sites have been created since then. How do I change the site template used for the root site of a site collection with sub sites?

Fellow MVP Shane Young blogged an article that comes closest to addressing this scenario here:http://msmvps.com/blogs/shane/archive/2006/02/15/83787.aspx Unfortunately, the scenario is based on WSS 2.0 and if you’re working with WSS 3.0, this might not work. So you are left having to either adapt Shane’s article to 3.0 or go with the simplest way possible which is the recreation of the site.  Microsoft’s conservative recommendation would be, as you already noted, to delete the site and then recreate it using the correct template. Since you have sub sites in this site collection, you will need to backup the sub sites BEFORE you can do this.  Of course, in the process of templatizing/backing up sub site, you could run into problems if you’re trying to save a site as a template and it exceeds the 10 MB limit.  Given that, I would recommend that you increase your site template site limit before templatizing sub sites.  Here are the steps I would recommend to resolve your issue:

1. Schedule an outage of the sites and conduct this process off hours in order to ensure that nobody is making changes to the sites while you’re doing this.  COMMUNICATE this with your users clearly.  Users can get very testy about these things.  
2. BACKUP YOUR DATABASE BEFORE YOU START!!!
3. Increase your site template size limit.  Follow the instructions from this article: http://www.cjvandyk.com/blog/Lists/Posts/ViewPost.aspx?ID=111
4. Templatize each sub site by using the “Save as Template” option on the Site Administration page.
5. Clearly record the permissions for each sub site.
6. Go to the site collection Site Template Gallery and download a local copy of all the site templates (.stp) to your computer.
7. Delete each sub site.
8. Delete the root site of the site collection.
9. Create a new site collection, this time selecting the RIGHT template!  
10. Go to the Site Template Gallery of the new site collection.
11. Upload all the .stp files you downloaded in step 4.
12. Each of the uploaded templates should now show up as options in the Create menu.  Recreate each site using its template in turn.
13. Recreate the permissions for each site using the information captured in step 5.
14. Navigate back to the site collection’s Site Template Gallery and delete all the .stp templates you uploaded in step 11.  This is to remove the sites as create options and is done for security reasons.

And that should do it! The hardest part of this process is capturing and re-establishing permissions on the sites, especially if your site administrators use fine grained permissions i.e. grant library, folder or item level permissions.  In such cases, it might not be possible to fully capture the complete permissions set without expending massive amounts of time. In cases where granular permissions are in play, I recommend leveraging an automated tool to backup the sites. AvePoint has a good tool that does a nice job of this called DocAve. You can download a 30 day trial of DocAve and use it if this is a onetime occurrence. Of course DocAve has many more features that might well make it worth owning for your environment. Luckily this kind of scenario doesn’t happen too often… right? 

Cheers
C

Been quiet for a while…

OK, so I’ve not posted for a while… well, since I went solo really. There are a lot more little time consuming overhead items involved in starting your own company. This has kept me busy for the past couple of weeks. Of course, a lot of my time has been consumed by my registrar consolidation…

Stay tuned… much more useful and original content coming to this blog in the future… 

Cheers
C

You’ve got to be kidding me! Moving to a new domain Registrar should NOT be this difficult!

OK, so I own about a dozen or so domains. As a big batch of my domain started coming up for renewal, this batch being under Network Solutions, I began to think that domain registrar fees simply should not be as expensive as they are with Network Solutions. So I began to evaluate all the registrars in an effort to consolidate my domain under one roof. I ended up selecting GoDaddy as my registrar of choice. Their costs are much more reasonable than Network Solutions and their control panel is much more straight forward and clear… and then my woes began…

I started by logging into my Network Solution, 1and1 and M6.net accounts and setting my domains to “Unlocked” status so that transfer can occur. I then requested and got a confirmation key code for each domain, except M6.net who is STILL holding my domains hostage. Then I signed up for a GoDaddy account and requested my domains be transferred, using the confirmation keys that I had previously received. True to the process, I received an email from my current registrars asking me to confirm that I’m moving my domains to another registrar. I clicked on the links provided and logged into the confirmation pages where I then confirmed that I was making the transfer.

OK, that should be it right? That should be all that’s required to allow my domains to switch to the new registrar. I even configured GoDaddy to keep the existing domain settings from the original registrar so that services would not be interrupted. That should be it right? WRONG!!!

I will say that 1and1 released and relinquished their domains without hassle or fuss and the transfer was pretty seamless. Unfortunately the same cannot be said of Network Solutions. If it wasn’t for the fact that M6.net was holding my domains hostage, I would say that Network Solutions was the worst registrar in my book. As it is, they are only slightly better than M6.net. Why do I say that? Where do I begin? OK, here goes…

To start, Network Solutions noted that the transfer could take up to 4 days to complete. Up to? It DID take 4 days to complete! Even after I logged into their confirmation page and explicitly confirmed that I wanted to transfer my domains, it still took 4 days after that! Why? I just don’t get it. Alas, that’s not the worst of it. In what I can only think is sheer spitefulness, Network Solutions moved my domain settings from their DNS pointers that point to my blog, email and other locations, to the default parked domain settings. Then they stonewalled the transfer for 4 days before finally handing it over to GoDaddy. Besides the fact that this action dumped my online activities such as my blog, email etc. into darkness for 4 days, I had to reconfigure all my settings from scratch once I got the domain to GoDaddy! There must be something illegal about what Network Solutions did…

Given my 4 days of darkness, you may have noticed my blog disappearing. At least I have it back up and running again and everything at GoDaddy works really great. No if I can just get M6.net to respond to my email, since they do NOT provide a phone number. Actually, I lie. They DO provide a phone number to contact for support. Of course when you dial it, you simply get a fax tone!

And so the trials and tribulations of domain consolidation continues…

Cheers
C

You’ve got to be kidding me! Moving to a new domain Registrar should NOT be this difficult

OK, so I own about a dozen or so domains. As a big batch of my domain started coming up for renewal, this batch being under Network Solutions, I began to think that domain registrar fees simply should not be as expensive as they are with Network Solutions. So I began to evaluate all the registrars in an effort to consolidate my domain under one roof. I ended up selecting GoDaddy as my registrar of choice. Their costs are much more reasonable than Network Solutions and their control panel is much more straight forward and clear… and then my woes began…

I started by logging into my Network Solution, 1and1 and M6.net accounts and setting my domains to “Unlocked” status so that transfer can occur. I then requested and got a confirmation key code for each domain, except M6.net who is STILL holding my domains hostage. Then I signed up for a GoDaddy account and requested my domains be transferred, using the confirmation keys that I had previously received. True to the process, I received an email from my current registrars asking me to confirm that I’m moving my domains to another registrar. I clicked on the links provided and logged into the confirmation pages where I then confirmed that I was making the transfer.

OK, that should be it right? That should be all that’s required to allow my domains to switch to the new registrar. I even configured GoDaddy to keep the existing domain settings from the original registrar so that services would not be interrupted. That should be it right? WRONG!!!

I will say that 1and1 released and relinquished their domains without hassle or fuss and the transfer was pretty seamless. Unfortunately the same cannot be said of Network Solutions. If it wasn’t for the fact that M6.net was holding my domains hostage, I would say that Network Solutions was the worst registrar in my book. As it is, they are only slightly better than M6.net. Why do I say that? Where do I begin? OK, here goes…

To start, Network Solutions noted that the transfer could take up to 4 days to complete. Up to? It DID take 4 days to complete! Even after I logged into their confirmation page and explicitly confirmed that I wanted to transfer my domains, it still took 4 days after that! Why? I just don’t get it. Alas, that’s not the worst of it. In what I can only think is sheer spitefulness, Network Solutions moved my domain settings from their DNS pointers that point to my blog, email and other locations, to the default parked domain settings. Then they stonewalled the transfer for 4 days before finally handing it over to GoDaddy. Besides the fact that this action dumped my online activities such as my blog, email etc. into darkness for 4 days, I had to reconfigure all my settings from scratch once I got the domain to GoDaddy! There must be something illegal about what Network Solutions did…

Given my 4 days of darkness, you may have noticed my blog disappearing. At least I have it back up and running again and everything at GoDaddy works really great. No if I can just get M6.net to respond to my email, since they do NOT provide a phone number. Actually, I lie. They DO provide a phone number to contact for support. Of course when you dial it, you simply get a fax tone!

And so the trials and tribulations of domain consolidation continues…

Cheers
C