Nick Grattan’s SharePoint Blog

Or am I more likely to be abducted by aliens? Well, if you installed MOSS Service Pack 2 from a download before the 29th July 2009 your production MOSS Farm could stop working in the future. This is explained in Microsoft KB 971620 and in this Microsoft blog post.

In summary, initial releases of SP2 was configured as a trial version, and unless re-installed, MOSS features will stop working 180 days after you installed SP2. The value “180″ is reported in the KB, but this value seems to be different in practice.

To determine if your MOSS Farm is at risk you can:

• Run Central Administration.
• Select Operations.
• Select Convert license type in the “Upgrade and Migration” section.

The description of “Current License” will show if you installed SP2 with the trial version problem:

You can also determine when the trial version will expire:

• Run Central Administration
• Select Application Management.
• Select Check services enabled in this farm in the “Office SharePoint Server Shared Services” section.

A warning will be displayed if you’re running the trial version:

KB 971620 contains a link to a hotfix to correct this issue. This hotfix may require you to reboot the server. Before testing if the fix was applied correctly, issue an IISRESET before running Central Administration.

Thanks to Tim at Cork County Council for pointing out this issue.

In this post I explained how to determine if your SharePoint installation is service packed, and to what level. However, the situation is a little more complex since your MOSS 2007 farm will be running Microsoft SharePoint Services 3.0 and MOSS on top.

When using Central Administration / Operations / Servers In Farm to report the version number you’re seeing the Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 version number. This will be updated when you run the Windows SharePoint Services (WSS) service pack update.

So how do you find which service pack for MOSS you’re running with? One way is to find the version number of the Microsoft.Office.Server assembly from the Windows GAC (Global Assembly Cache). To do this:

• Run the Windows Explorer.
• Navigate to \Windows\Assembly.
• Right-click the file Microsoft.Office.Server and select Properties.
• Click the Version tab.
• Take a note of the “File Version”:

Here are the version numbers for the main MOSS services packs using this technique:

Version numbers from the Microsoft.Office.Server assembly do not follow exactly those for the WSS reported version number, but there is a close correlation.

Question: When a site page is customized where is it stored? Does it have to be copied to each web server in a server farm?

Answer: Site pages, such as “default.aspx” are stored in the appropriate folder for the site template under “C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\12\TEMPLATE\SiteTemplates”.

When these files are customised in SharePoint Designer the customized version of the file is stored in the content database in SQL Server for the site collection. Therefore the customized file is automatically available to all web servers.

Uncustomized site pages are shared between all sites that based on the site template. Sites that customize the site page have their own page that must be loaded from the content database, and are therefore less efficient.

In previous versions of SharePoint “customized” and “uncustomized” pages were known as “unghosted” and “ghosted”.