Microsoft SharePoint Important Information

Microsoft has discovered a major bug in Office SharePoint Server 2007 Service Pack 2 that renders SharePoint inaccessible after 180 days, and the company says it's working on a hotfix. In a quickly blog post, corporate vice president of the Office SharePoint Server Group at Microsoft, said the problem stems from the product expiration date being improperly activated during the installation of SharePoint 2007 SP2. This causes SharePoint to function as a trial version and shut down after six months.

The glitch may seem minor, but given the booming popularity of SharePoint, which last year became a billion-dollar business for Microsoft, it's one that could irritate partners who've been seeing a steady stream of SharePoint services business. Microsoft is working on a hotfix to correct the problem and is directing customers to a manual workaround that involves re-entering the Product ID number (PID) on the Convert License Type page in Central Administration, Teper said, adding that the SharePoint shutdown doesn't impact customers' data, configuration or application code.

We want to assure our customers that this issue does not impact data integrity or their SharePoint deployment in any other way," Teper wrote. The SP2 glitch affects Office SharePoint Server 2007, Project Server 2007, Form Server 2007, Search Server 2008 and Search Server 2008 Express, but not Windows SharePoint Services 3.0. Testing a SharePoint project is quite a tedious job – there are a lot of floating parts out there which make it complicated and time consuming. So every thing which makes it a little easier is interesting. (Another reason for using it was to generate usage logs so that I could start working on my SharePoint extensions – Usage Statistics again) The last couple of days I have been looking at how I can use Visual Studio 2008 Test Edition to test SharePoint Server 2007 (this would also work with WSS 3.0).