Exploring SharePoint Export

I'm currently working with a client for whom I'm upgrading their mixed 2007 and 2010 farm to SharePoint 2013.  Unfortunately, a site collection on a SharePoint 2007 farm they no longer have access to was exported instead of backed up.  What makes matters worse, whoever performed the export, expanded the .cmp file.  My client wanted the files from export.

While there are a few sites that give instructions on how to perform imports (like, here, here and here), as anyone who has worked with SharePoint 2007, it can be very finicky - everything, including the stars, must line up.  I also tried "re-compressing" the export file since the .cmp file is nothing more than a .cab file.  However, I had additional issues with the resulting .cab file since we were dealing with a 7GB file on a Windows 2003 machine (they don't play nicely together).  I also tried using a tool from Mike Smith to convert the files from the export file.  But, being that Mike hadn't worked on the solution since many years ago, of course, the application was giving me cryptic exception errors.

After all failed attempts, I was finally required to write a PowerShell script that reads the Manifest.xml and converts all of the .dat files to their original filenames in the original SharePoint 2007 file structure.  I've posted the PowerShell script on GitHub.

Have fun!


Moving Hyper-V to Azure

This past week I needed to move a client's Hyper-V machine to a Windows Azure VM.  If you haven't figured it out already, the process isn't as straightforward as one may hope - especially, since there's a rather large chasm between the new and old Azure management portals as neither offer an entire end-to-end solution.  As with most things Microsoft nowadays, PowerShell seems to be the best solution for truly accomplishing your needs.

Below, you'll find a resource for tackling all of the different components of moving a Hyper-V VM to Azure.  There are some ways to do parts of this through the various GUI's, but, again, none of the GUI's offer a complete solution.

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SharePoint People Picker Searching Accounts Across External Active Directory Trusts

In instances where your network administrator has created an external trust with another domain, you may want the SharePoint People Picker to find users in the external AD.

According to Microsoft's TechNet, "The People Picker automatically issues queries to all two-way trusted domains when it uses the application pool account to search for users and groups. When you select a secondary account in the People Picker, the primary account information will be returned."  Therefore, by default two-way trusts are automatically searched.

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