Anyway, I recently had a situation where someone (honestly, in this case it wasn’t me) accidentally deleted the Site Collection for the SSP admin site (/ssp/admin).  Since this was for a SharePoint farm in production I really didn’t want to have to re-create the entire SSP but I couldn’t figure out how to just re-create the site collection itself.  I figured there had to be a site template for the site but since it didn’t show up in the Create Site Collection UI I went and looked on disk.  Sure enough, a site template exists for the SSP Admin site.  It’s called OSRV.

So to create a new SSP admin site, run this command line.

stsadm.exe -o createsite -url http://<server>:<ssp_port>/ssp/admin -owneremail <email address> -ownerlogin <account> -sitetemplate OSRV#0 -title "Shared Services Administration: <your ssp name>"

This might take a little while to complete, but it does eventually finish.

Next you need to edit the SSP to point to the recreated site.

stsadm.exe -o editssp -title "<your ssp name>" -sspadminsite http://<server>:<ssp_port>/ssp/admin

That’s it.  You should be back up and running.

About a year and a half ago I was talking with an associate and he mentioned Iron Python and how it could apply to SharePoint. At the time I was working on other projects but I filed it away as something to play with when I had time. Once I finally got around to it I started to realize just how useful this combination is. I won’t go into the details of what Iron Python is specifically, you can read about it on the site. But essentially you get a powerful scripting language with full access to the SharePoint object model. On top of that, Python has an interactive console so it’s easy to load up an object, poke around its properties, and inspect exactly what each object does.

Here’s a quick example of a Python script enumerating all sites in a site collection and printing out the URL and root web name:

webapp = SPWebApplication.Lookup(Uri("http://mysite"))
for site in webapp.Sites:
  print '%-30s - %s' % (site.Url, site.RootWeb.Title)

Ever need to quickly get the internal name of a particular field?

list = SPSite("http://mysite").RootWeb.Lists["Documents"]
for field in list.Fields:
  print field.InternalName

Okay – these two examples might be fairly simplistic, but the point is Iron Python can be a much quicker and easier way of doing things with the SharePoint object model that you would normally have to write a custom console application for.

Getting Started

First, download Iron Python and install it on your SharePoint server. Next, fire up a console and type “ipy“. This will launch the Iron Python interactive console.

Next, type the following lines:

>>> import clr
>>> clr.AddReference("Microsoft.SharePoint")
>>> from Microsoft.SharePoint import *

Let’s look at what we’ve done. In Python the “import” statement is like the “using” statement in C#. It tells the interpreter that we want to use a particular module. In this case, we’re importing the interface to the .NET Common Language Runtime.

Next, clr.AddReference() is used to tell Iron Python that we want to load the Microsoft.SharePoint assembly. This same approach can be used to load any SharePoint assembly (or any .NET assembly for that matter). Finally, the last line imports all objects in the Microsoft.SharePoint namespace. This only imports objects in the Microsoft.SharePoint namespace. If you want to load objects from another namespace, you’ll need to import those as well.

At this point, you’re ready to go. Try out these lines to explore the object model.

>>> site = SPSite("http://myserver")
>>> for web in site.AllWebs:
. . .     print web.Title

>>> list = site.RootWeb.Lists["Documents"]
>>> list.Title = "Python Documents"
>>> list.Update()
>>> print list.Title

Unit Testing and Debugging

The interactive console can be extremely useful for unit testing your code as well as debugging. Since I’ve started using Iron Python I’ve often kept a console up while working on whatever application I’m building. It’s come in extremely handy when you just want to look up a particular method or see exactly what the format is of a particular piece of data. But another useful aspect is that it can be used to quickly test out the code that you write.

Iron Python can load any .NET assembly. So if you want to test out a method you’ve just written, load it up in the Iron Python interactive console and test it out. Building a real unit testing environment can be difficult in SharePoint because of the long setup and teardown times. This can be a happy compromise between a full on unit testing setup.

Cooking with Gas

One thing I hate is tech sites that show elementary examples and don’t really get into the complexity that is sure to arise once you move past “Hello World”. So I’ve uploaded a sample script that can be used to back up all sites in a given web application. This example combines a number of concepts such as:

• running stsadm commands from python
• importing parts of the .NET framework into your scripts
• functions as objects in python

Download the script here.

Conclusion

I’ve been very impressed by the power of Iron Python and what means for us SharePoint developers. My prediction is that by using scripting tools like Iron Python, developers and administrators will begin to write scripts to automate a number of common SharePoint activities. Personally I’d really like to see some of the following:

• Mass check-in/publish scripts
• Scripts to upload a given web part to every page in a site
• Data/content migration

Reference

• Iron Python website – get the code and learn how to use it
• Python Tutorial – very valuable introduction to the Python language

“Why are Yahoo! and MSN such complex-looking places? Because their systems are easier to use. Not because they are complex, but because they simplify the life of their users by letting them see their choices on the home page: news, alternative searches, other items of interest.”

My first thought when reading that was “then why is the damn SharePoint Central Admin so hard to use??”.  I don’t know about you, but every time I go in there I feel like an idiot because I have to stare at the page for 5 minutes and scan each link to remember which item will take me to the options I need.  Not only that, but I frequently have to click on an item to remember “nope – that’s not the one”.

On the other hand, I think about other interfaces like Window’s control panel.  One of the first things I do when I install Windows is revert the control panel to classic mode so that I can easily see all options available to me.

Maybe the reason why Central Admin is so hard to use is that they’ve tried to show you many options at once, but still in a grouped way.  For example, first off you have the Operations and Application Management tabs.  My first challenge when I’m looking for something is to remember what tab it’s on.  I can’t tell you how many times I’ve quickly scanned the Operations page not seeing what I need, gone to the Application Management tab only to come back to the Ops tab after reading through EVERY link on that page (and clicking on quite a few).

Then, on each page you have groupings of links: Global Configuration, Topology and Services, Security Configuration, etc.  When you’re just scanning the page you tend to see the group names before the links themselves so if you don’t remember what group something is in, you might miss it on a quick pass.

Maybe a better UI would be a simple alphabetized list of all links.  I usually know the name of the link I want, I just can’t remember what group or what tab it’s on.

Or another idea would be to group related options into “Tools” similar to the control panel in Windows.  You could have

• Security Manager – all security settings including farm accounts, farm administrators, etc
• Site Manager – configure web apps and site collections
• Server Manager – services, backup and restore, farm topology, etc

Anyway, all I know is that central admin is hard to use.  But on the other hand, maybe that’s inevitable when you have a product as large and with as many options as SharePoint has.

“Since the end of May, Beta 2 has been downloaded more than 3 million times…That’s 500 percent more than what was expected.  The fee helps offset the cost of downloading from the servers.”

Did you catch that?  500% more than expected?  3 million downloads for a beta?  The fact that there is that much interest in the market for the next wave of Office System is a great thing for folks in our field.  I believe this release of Office and all that goes along with it (SharePoint etc) will be a huge one for Microsoft and for its partners.  There seems to be a lot of genuine interest in the market and that can only be good for implementers, consultants, and developers specializing in the technology.

Oh, one more thing.  I believe MS when it says that this charge is there to offset the bandwidth cost.  In my mind, charging $1.50 is the same as charging $3.00 or $5.00.  Someone who is willing to spend $1.50 is just as willing to spend $5.00 to download.  So if MS were out to make money I believe they would have charged a little more than $1.50.