Use Remote SMTP server for MOSS Incoming e-mail settings

If Microsoft Office Sharepoint Server is installed on a server that doesn’t have a local SMTP server or you could not install SMTP service becuase Exchange 2007 runs on the same server, you could use the remote SMTP server as follows:

First find the account that Windows SharePoint Services Timer runs under.

Then login to the remote SMTP server (a local server that’s part of the same domain as your MOSS server)

I assume you have already installed SMTP service on the remote computer. Browse to the default SMTP mail directory (usually C:\Inetpub\mailroot) and setup a share for the mailroot folder called MossMailRoot

Add the service account (uk\sharepoint) for the mailroot folder with full permissions.

Now open Central Administration à Operations page on your MOSS server

Open Incoming e-mail settings and set E-mail Server Display address as sharepoint.local and the E-mail drop folder as \\<servername>\<sharename>\Drop

You need to update your DNS server records to point sharepoint.local to the remote SMTP server

On the Remote server, Open IIS console and drill down to Default SMTP Virtual Server. Add new Alias domain for sharepoint.local

The server setup is complete. Now browse to your Intranet page and setup Incoming E-Mail Settings for one of the libraries.

Now When the users send an email from their Outlook client to announcements@sharepoint.local the email will be received by your Exchange. Assuming you have Exchange 2007, you need to configure a Send Connector so that Exchange knows where to forward that email.

The Send Connector will have the following configuration

Once this send connector is configured, Exchange 2007 will forward all emails with sharepoint.local domain to the remote SMTP server. The email will be stored in the Drop folder.

The Windows SharePoint Services Timer service monitors this folder at regular intervals as the network path is given in its configuration. If it finds any emails, it will check for the recipient email address and routes the email to appropriate Sharepoint library. After that it deletes the email message from the Drop folder. That’s why you need to give modify permissions for the service account on the mailroot folder.

Cannot open SharePoint sites in Firefox

If you use Firefox along with Internet Explorer, each time you want to open up an internal network site or SharePoint or Team System Web Access etc…you have to provide your windows credentials or log in with some valid details.  This will repeat with every page you access and have to use Internet Explorer to stop Firefox annoying you.

You have to enable NTLM using the following steps, so that Firefox will authenticate automatically.

1. Open Firefox
2. Type about:config in the address bar and hit Enter.
3. Type network.automatic in the top Filter bar
4. Right click network.automatic-ntlm-auth.trusted-uris and click Modify
5. Enter only the names of your internal(SharePoint) servers in a comma-delimited list.  For example: lon-ad-01,contoso and click OK.
6. Restart Firefox

You should be able to access all of your SharePoint sites on the servers you entered through Firefox now without providing credentials repeatedly.

The above setting is usually stored in “prefs.js” in the following directory:

C:\Documents and Settings\<username>\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\<uniqueid>.default
eg: C:\Documents and Settings\technobuff\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\viqz4db1.default

Office Project doesn’t save/publish or Queue hangs in Project Server 2007

If you are working on a project using Office Project 2007 to list out all the tasks and when you publish the project after completion,

 there might be a indefinite pause for publishing the project. The Resources allocated might not be notified of the changes. If you notice the office project status bar, you will notice that it is expected to complete in 2sec and it stays still.

What happens is, the job stays in the queue on the project server. The purpose of the Office Project Server 2007 Queuing System is to handle these abrupt changes in demand gracefully and reliably. The Queuing System takes all the users’ input, records entries for the requests in Microsoft SQL Server, and then processes the data asynchronously on a first-come, first-served basis. Having a queue ensures that the Office Project Server 2007 EPM solution does not stop working when a spike in demand occurs.

Solution: Check the jobs in the queue by logging into Project Web access as an administrator.

PWA–>Server Settings–>Manage Queue

If there are lot of jobs “Waiting To Be Processed”, Canceling and Retrying may make no difference. Open the Services MMC and find “Microsoft Office Project Server Queue Service”. Restart the service and Refresh status of the jobs in PWA. The jobs will be processed now. If your database is on a different server from the application server, make sure that both the servers have the same time.

If you want to know more about Project Server 2007 Queuing system, refer to Technet