Enabling Self Service Site Creation

Log into the Central Administration Site (Note this is a unique site collection as well and if you have it located on a funny port number, it is usually a good idea to add it to your My Links)

Click Application Management

Click Self-service site management

Select the correct web application (that step is easy to miss) and select On for Enable Self-Service Site Creation

Click OK

Then you need to:

Go to the Shared Service Provider that is hosting the MySites

Go to Personalization Services Permissions

Add or Edit the user account you want to enable the MySites functionality for.

- If you want to give all authenticated users permissions then edit the NT Authority\Authenticated Users account
- If you previously deleted the Authenticated Users Account then you might have to add it back in if the first part of step 3a remains true.

When you get to the permissions screen check these 2 permissions:
- Create Personal Site
- Use Personal Features

Make sure you have planned for capacity if enabling MySites for everybody !!

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Before You Begin
Before you begin installing SharePoint you need to make some decisions. First, decide what service accounts will be used to run SharePoint. Second, decide on a naming convention for the SQL databases that will be created during configuration.

Service Accounts
There are many configuration possibilities for SharePoint service accounts. At a minimum however you should define one account which will act as the primary service account (your Farm Account), one account which will be used to crawl content, and one account which will be used as the application pool identity for your SharePoint site. This installation guide uses these three accounts.

Before starting with the install, create three domain accounts for each of the roles below. I recommend using a naming convention to easily identify that these three accounts are all SharePoint service accounts.

Farm Account
Crawl Account
Portal Account

Database Naming Conventions
A best practice is to define a common prefix that will be used for all SharePoint databases. This could be SharePoint_ or SP_ etc. For example, if you chose `SP_` as the prefix, your database names would end up looking like this:

SP_Config
SP_SSP_DB
SP_SSP_Search
SP_Portal_Content
etc.

Read the rest of this Moss Installation Guide here

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I have just used this procedure which I found on Steve Graegerts blog (http://graegert.com/) & it work perfectly:

WSS 3.0 and MOSS 2007 can only be installed with Service Pack 1. You need to download WSS 3.0 including SP1 not WSS 3.0 & SP1. You cannot download MOSS 2007 with SP1 included so we will have to slipstream the installation.

In order to allow MOSS 2007 to be installed on Windows Server 2008 we have to provide the necessary updates prior to installation. Here is how it can be done:

1. Copy all installation files from you MOSS 2007 CD/DVD to a temporary directory (i.e. D:\Temp\moss).

2. Copy both the WSS 3.0 SP1 and MOSS 2007 SP1 to another temporary directory (D:\Temp\sp1)

3. Next, we need to copy all files inside the SP1 archives into the MOSS 2007 Updates directory usually located at \x86\Updates depending on your platform:

1. Open a console (Start > Run > Enter: cmd) and navigate to the SP1’s temporary directory
cd D:\Temp\sp1

2. Extract both archives to the Updates directory using the following commands:

officeserver2007sp1-kb936984-x86-fullfile-en-us.exe /extract:D:\temp\moss\Updates

wssv3sp1-kb936988-x86-fullfile-en-us.exe /extract:D:\temp\moss\Updates

You will find all extracted files in the Updates directory.

4. Start the MOSS 2007 installation as normal and follow the instructions.

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Thanks to John for this solution:

“Well after lots of experimenting and a call to Microsoft. Here are my results. I have been able to successfully restore the ENTIRE farm to a new server with a new name, a new SQL server, and even change the port numbers or website urls of the web applications. There are 3 main ways to restore. Through SharePoint Designer (did not try) through the stsadmin command line (or GUI within the Central Administration website) and through SQL and some recreation.”

“I originally tried to use the GUI to restore but this ONLY works if your website is pristine. No changes, no modifications and no port sharing with host headers for the web applications. Even with the site being pristine the restore of the SSP seemed to always fail. If you use this method you might get your sites back up but you will have to recreate your SSP. Not really an option since we all know how bad change management is.”

“After speaking with MS support the best way to restore a farm is through SQL backups. Below are the steps that I took and it worked 3 times.”

1. Install SharePoint on the new server.
2. Run the configuration wizard to connect it to the new SQL server. If you are connecting to the same SQL server delete (I would backup first) the Admin Content and Config databases. The configuration wizard will recreate these.
3. Install the same updates and services packs as on the original server. I did this with SP 2007 SP1. Make sure you run the configuration updates after the service packs.
4. Restore your website content databases and your two shared services databases (SharedServices1_DB and SharedServices1_Search_DB for example). In my case I had only three web applications. Portal, MySite, and SSPAdmin or 5 databases all together. Don t worry about the search database. You will have to recrawl your website anyway. MAKE SURE THE DATABASE NAMES ARE EXACTLY THE SAME AS THEY WERE ORIGINALLY.
5. Recreate your web applications. My case they were portal, mysite, sspadmin. When you create them this is your chance to change a URL or a port number or enter a host header. When you get to the database name, put in a fake name such as WSS_Portal_DeleteMe. You will delete this database later. Do this for all your webapplications.
6. Next step is to remove the temp database from each web application and attach the real database you restored in step 4. To do this go to Central Administration -> Application Management -> Content Databases. Select the web application you would like to change. Select the database name (for example WSS_Portal_DeleteMe). Check the box in the next screen to remove content database. You should now see no database attached to the web application (it also remove it off the sql server). Select add a content database. For the database name put the name in EXACTLY as you restored it which should be EXACTLY like it originally was. Don t worry about the Search Server field since you have not started that service yet. Do this for all your web applications. You now have three new web applications attached to your 3 restored content databases.
7. Start required services on new server. Go to Central Administration -> Operations -> Services on Server. Start the Windows SharePoint and Office SharePoint searches. Let it create a new database.
8. Restore your SSP (these are the other two databases you restored earlier). Central Admin -> App Management -> Manage this farm’s shared services (Click in the Shared Services link on the left!). Select Restore SSP. Name the SSP (Can use the same name as before SharedServices1 or change it. I would leave it so it matches the DB name) Make sure you select your SSPadmin and MySite web applications your created earlier and your restored database names. Do I have to mention again to make sure the names are exact! Select the index server (it is now available since you started the service). You will get a warning stating you are changing the association of the existing web applications. Click OK.
9. Install any 3rd party web parts or custom ASPX pages before you try and open the site so it does not mess with any formatting.
10. Open your SSP website and start a full crawl and user import. You should notice that all your SSP settings are still there.
11. Since you did not restore the Sharepoint_AdminContent database you will have recreate things like smtp server names. These are all easy things that can be found off the main Central Admin Page. You should even go through the steps they list and complete each one.

You should now have a fully functioning SharePoint site on a new server with a new sql server.

“So, what am I backing up? I am taking SQL backups of all the databases I listed above as well as all the 3rd party web parts and customizations to things installed in the 12 folder. You could back up that entire folder if you like since it is not very big.”

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This article will guide you through the Microsoft Office SharePoint Server
2007 backup and restore/migrate process using the SharePoint Central
Administration Web site user interface or the Stsadm.exe command-line tool.
The method provided in the article below is recommended and supported by
Microsoft.

Using the built-in tools of Office SharePoint Server 2007, you can back up
and restore an entire server farm or specific Web applications and content
databases. These built-in tools allow you to keep elements of your server
farm, such as search and the Shared Services Provider, synchronized when
backing up and restoring.

Note: Backup and recovery will not back up and restore the following:
- The configuration database can be backed up but not restored.
- Any custom solutions that have been deployed
- Alternate access mappings
- The Web application that hosts the SharePoint Central Administration Web
site
- The Central Administration content database
- The Internet Information Services metabase, Internet Information
Services-specific settings, and the Web.config file.

Administering backup and recovery for Office SharePoint Server 2007

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Download Microsoft Office Programs and SharePoint Products and Technologies Integration – Fair, Good, Better, Best here

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Use the following command:

stsadm -o activatefeature -filename IPFS\feature.xml -url http://%siteCollection_URL% -force

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Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007 Limits

Site Collections in a Web Application 50,000
Sites in a Site Collection 250,000
Sub-sites nested under a Site 2,000
Lists on a Site 2,000
Items in a List 10,000,000
Documents in a Library 2,000,000
Documents in a Folder 2,000
Maximum document file size 2GB
Documents in an Index 50,000,000
Search Scopes 1,000
User Profiles 5,000,000

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If you are looking to open up parts of your MOSS 2007 site to the Internet so that external people can access parts of your site you will probably be looking at configuring Forms Authentication.

A step by step guide in enabling forms authentication in MOSS 2007

& another guide here

and to learn how to enable forms based authentication for MySites and Personlization

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Planning, Designing & Securing an Extranet and Internet Facing WSSv3 and SharePoint Server 2007 Environments. This excellent resource from the Microsoft team can be found here

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