Hooray, it’s here and I don’t have to do that goofy US, er, hack…

Just a quick update as I’ve been quiet lately. But there are a few cool things going on that at least needed to be shared, so here goes (brief, but you get what you get

What

Good news.  ActiveSync doesn’t require you to know your “pod” (server) anymore when connecting ActiveSync to Exchange that has been upgraded in the Office 2013 refresh (wallbridge.com just got upgraded in the last 3 days).  The bad news is you may need to reset your ActiveSync settings as you may have an old Server entry in your settings.

It’s been a while since I last wrote – I hope business has been steady and is looking up as we approach summer.

April has been a mixed month with conflicting economic reports, the Boston bombing (so sad, but amazing resilience), corralling my family through airports and Disneyworld, and of course, the run up to the BC elections.

We had a wonderful time and there’s one thing I learned on our trip. If you want to see the future of technology, visit Disneyworld. It’s hard to see past the cutesy characters and rides but their tech is second to none! Biometric fingerprint stations [video] that blend into the environment. The image above is their iPhone app for booking restaurants and rides [iTunes].

Disney does tech with style and flair that doesn’t detract from the focus on fun and happiness. It is, after all, the “happiest place on earth“, which showed, as Instagram usage must have spiked, as I flooded them with trip photos.

Back at home, Jeff, our Director of Sales & Consulting Services, picked up a portion of slack in my absence (I have a wonderful team who are great at filling in when needed). Jeff relies on his project management expertise heavily, and is bringing project management into the cloud with Project Server 2013. I fully endorse these internal initiatives because they usually turn into something useful.

Shifting offices to Microsoft’s Office 365 cloud offering continues to happen for more and more companies. Check out Toyota’s recent case study for using Office 365 tools for their communication and collaboration spanning locations and countries. We are also seeing local customer’s benefit financially. We’ll have our own case studies on these shortly.

Note, this isn’t a technical discussion.  I’m not going to go deep into discussions about web applications vs. managed paths, SSL, etc. when scaling up or out.  I simply wanted to share how we named our SharePoint web applications and subsequently became the same advice we give our clients.

Ran into this on Friday at a customer.  Unexpected as the database logging file size shouldn’t have been changed in the first place but it could happen elsewhere. Hope this helps others.

What

• Event ID: 5586
• Error Posted: Unknown SQL Exception 9002 occurred. Additional error information from SQL Server is included below. The transaction log for database ‘ContentDB02′ is full. To find out why space in the log cannot be reused, see the log_reuse_wait_desc column in sys.databases

So What

Sucks don’t it? SharePoint can’t write anymore. From the SharePoint side, certain site collections couldn’t add/edit content but SharePoint pages would still render. When writing, a generic correlation ID would appear so the clue was in the Servers Event Logs only.

The reality/issue was that the database in question was changed from its default logging database maximum size of 2,097,152 MB to 2,048MB (2GB). Sure enough, on the file system, the LDB file for the database was showing 1.9GB or so. Not sure who changed this from the default but that is another story. As the logfiles are well managed and checked, it was recent activity (huge volumes) of transactions within a matter of a day or so that caused it to climb.

Now What

While there is a bunch of ways to approach this, short and sweet was in order as I had a class to teach.

1. First off was to shrink the logging database file (in SQL manager, shrink the database and the file, first of course setting its database recovery type to Simple)
2. Set the database limit back to the defaults … as it shouldn’t have been changed in the first place in this circumstance

Got my email re: 5th year as a Microsoft MVP for SharePoint Server today. Always strange to get it on April Fools but real all the same. Thanks to all for your support.

I love that we are living the dream of BYOD (Bring your own device) and felt the need to illustrate it.

We provide a solid/secured centralized platform and our folks connect with their tool of choice. You could look at this as say Office 365 does the same thing for those that don’t want to make the investment and have the control we do.  Contact itgroove if you want to collaborate the way we do – on premise or in the Cloud (Office 365).

You may have heard stories of businesses hiring technology consultants to fix problems or create new solutions. Many of those stories end with the consultant not meeting the needs or expectations of the business.

A feeling of disappointment and resentment – but you can prevent this.

The reasons for failed technology projects are numerous; however projects come down to one thing: the people. These 6 things should help you avoid failed project situations by hiring good tech consultants – from the beginning.

You should ask consulting companies these six things to gauge whether they will fit your business and are quality consultants. Even hiring consultants means they should go through an interview process.

Shout out to Jarrod for putting this together for me.