SharePoint SP2 activates 180 day trial countdown

May 22, 2009   9:21

The Microsoft SharePoint Team announced that the SharePoint SP2 service pack by mistake activates a 180-day countdown.

“During the installation of SP2, a product expiration date is improperly activated. This means SharePoint will expire as though it was a trial installation 180 days after SP2 is deployed. The activation of the expiration date will not affect the normal function of SharePoint up until the expiration date passes. Furthermore, product expiration 180 days after SP2 installation will not affect customer’s data, configuration or application code but will render SharePoint inaccessible for end-users.”

The team is working as hard as possible to release a hotfix to address the issue.

The Work around is also known: Re-enter the Product ID numbers on the Convert License Type page in Central Administration.

More information at the Microsoft SharePoint team site.

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Audience compilation via the command line

May 13, 2009   9:58

Last month I had to work a lot with audiences and of course my development environment had an annoying malfunction. The manage audience page (/_layouts/Audience_Main.aspx) contains a nice compilation link, but it didn’t work.

The only other option on the page is to schedule the compilation, but it can only be scheduled to run once a day. Not very useful during development.

After some digging I found the command line application to control the audience job and luckily it wasn’t very complicated to use. Just run the application to get some more information:

The best of it is that the application provides you the GUIDs of available Shared Service providers.

To start a new compilation from scratch for all the audiences, run the command with the given GUID and the two other parameters:

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