First, find the service name:

Next you can use the SC command with queryex to find the PID for that service and then use taskkill to kill the service:

Couple notes – the /F flag is for forcing the service to stop. Try it first without the /F. A service hanging on ‘STOPPING’ is usually a bad sign, so you may want to figure out why this is happening before doing this.

jthake @sharepointshare why should we use this over using diigo or del.icio.us? take a read of http://bit.ly/7ZG07 interested in ur thoughts

It is a great question and one that I thought about before creating SharePoint Share. As Jermey and Joel point out, there are several avenues to share information, so why create another? I found myself frustrated by my current SharePoint RSS feeds was the main reason. I will go into that in a minute, but first thought I would summarize the issues I see in SharePoint information I consume from the web (which I am sure is not unique to SharePoint): trending topics, personal, local, fire hose, cryptic, and lastly the barrier to entry.

In a page of my RSS feeds it is typical for me to see 30 to 50 percent of the same trending topic post like SP2 is released, the SP2 issue, or one of the conferences that is coming up. Another 20 to 30 percent seem personal in some way, and lastly 10 percent are local based, like a local user group meeting. You add that up and it is pretty dismal. Yet I still go to my RSS feeds because there can be great finds in there, things that I would never even have searched for, but after seeing I can use them immediately or know of them later when they are more applicable.

That was enough reason for me to start SharePoint Share, but I also looked at two of the current alternatives that I was aware of: Delicious and Twitter.

Delicious and other bookmarking sites like Diigo (which I hadn’t heard of until now) are great for a number of reasons. First they allow me to save my bookmarks to a common area so I can use them from anywhere. Second, they support tagging so I actually have a chance to find them again, and lastly they allow us to share them with others and aggregate what is popular and not. When searching for something specific I will always use Google first, but then I will try Delicious (especially if it is a common area within SharePoint like workflows or InfoPath). I don’t however view it as a daily/weekly resource because of two reasons: fire hose problem (100+ links posted just today), and most people don’t use the notes feature so you are often left with only a cryptic title. Added to this is the trending issues especially when you start looking at multiple services like Delicious and Diigo.

Twitter suffers from the same two issues. Instead of a fire hose though, it seems more like Niagara Falls. And although 140 characters would often be better than a lot of titles on blogs, a link still is cryptic on what it exactly is and/or solves. I won’t rant on URL shorteners in this post, but I will say I don’t like not knowing where I am going to end up when I click on a link. Beyond that though, I am sure there is tons of great links and conversations on there about SharePoint, but I don’t see them because of the noise. From questions to rants, there are too many tweets marked even with the #sharepoint hash that don’t add anything to the community. That is probably how Twitter is suppose to be, more of a dip your toes in every now and then, but either way you are still going to have to filter out the noise.

My goal for SharePoint Share is to avoid the problems of trending topics, personal, local, fire hose, and cryptic. The personal, local, and fire hose issues are pretty much solved automatically. Cryptic can be a hard line to walk as you don’t want to put too much information on a platform like SharePoint Share as then it would replace the actual article. I will modify post titles and descriptions as I see fit and add/remove tags as needed to help with this issue. Avoiding trending topics is probably the most difficult problem, and I don’t know if that is necessary a bad thing always. If the community wants those type of items posted then I don’t see a problem with having them on the site.

Another problem that I haven’t mentioned yet is the barrier to entry. All the items above, whether it be a blog, Delicious bookmarks, or Twitter require an account. SharePoint Share does not. I think it is easy to see that most SharePoint administrators, developers, and end users don’t use these other tools to give back to the community, but I hope SharePoint Share gives them one avenue they can do that with by quickly adding content they find helpful or interesting without creating an account first.

In the end, I think all of these tools and resources solve different issues for different people and as a community each one has its place. I hope, between the issues it solves and some upcoming features that I plan to introduce, that SharePoint Share can add to the great SharePoint community.

Did you know you can use it with a intranet as well?  One thing that you have to watch out for though is if you use http internally and SSL (https) externally.  If so, check out Reuben Yau’s post on how to handle both cases with a little extra javascript.  If you want to use it with SharePoint 2007 you will just need to place the javascript within the master page so all your pages get tracked.

If you have some money to burn, I have read/heard that Mint is another package to check-out.  Leave a comment on others that you like or if you have used Mint.

Here is the error message you will see when you run the dbSPSReporting.sql script:

Msg 102, Level 15, State 1, Procedure usp_Insert_FactWSS, Line 57
Incorrect syntax near ‘WSSList’.
Cannot add rows to sys.sql_dependencies for the stored procedure because it depends on the missing table ‘usp_Insert_FactWSS’. The stored procedure will still be created; however, it cannot be successfully executed until the table exists.

The problem is there is a missing comma after WSSDoc nvarchar(255):

Create table dbo.tblTempWSS_ToFactLoad ( WSSFactID bigint identity not null Primary Key, SiteGUID uniqueidentifier, WebGUID uniqueidentifier, -- WSSDate datetime, -- Fix for Bug #: 403546 WSSDate smalldatetime, WSSTime nvarchar(8), --WSSUser nvarchar(150), --Fix for Bug #: 403546 WSSUser nvarchar(255), --WSSDoc nvarchar(50), --Fix for Bug #: 403546 WSSDoc nvarchar(255) WSSList uniqueidentifier 

Simply add the comma before you run the SQL script and everything will work fine. I find it very ironic that the new bug is right below the “Fix for Bug” comment that dealt with the previous problems in the first version. Bugs often introduce other bugs, but you would think something released for a Windows administrator would be checked a little closer. 

The keynote meeting Sunday night was a mixed bag.  Scott Guthrie started it off right and went into some of the new ASP.NET developments like Orcas, LINQ, and WPF/E. A couple cool demos were given and I can’t wait to work with those technologies more.  Just from Scott’s blog you can tell how much passion he has for what he does and it showed during his talk.

The rest of the keynote was disappointing.  A program manager from SQL was next and while it an okay presentation, it wasn’t geared for everyone. Did see a couple things like the SQL Performance Dashboard that I didn’t know about and will have to check out more.

The last presenter of the night was suppose to be Lawrence Liu, but his flight was delayed so Stacy Draper stepped in at the last minute.  I don’t think I would be able to do any better of a job in front of that many people, but his overview of WSS 3.0 and MOSS 2007 was really poor.  If anyone was hoping to get excited about SharePoint during the keynote they had to be disappointed.

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You have to enjoy that helpful IE7 error message right?  This past Monday I started getting an error everytime I tried to open an Office document from SharePoint 2003 (to be specific, a WSS 2.0 Team Site).

The exact error was:

This idea came together as I started working on our rollout plan for MOSS 2007. With 2003 we did some ad-hoc training at best and well, we payed for it. Although helpdesk calls are low, I think the “give up” rate is very high, and thus we are not getting the gains we could be seeing if users felt more comfortable with it.

Although I am already building some training materials and other reference documents, I probably won’t be posting them until later next month as I still haven’t figured out the best way to deliver it. In the mean time though, you will find a Google search bar that I created using their new Co-op program. I basically inputted ~175 sites from my bookmarks and other SharePoint references and this search will only search those sites, thus you will find a very clean search result set that I think works pretty well. I have the co-op search open so any one can volunteer and add urls, but I honestly can’t figure out how someone would do that yet, so if you want to post a comment for me to add one please do and I will be happy to update it in the mean time.