How to restart SharePoint Central Administration service after stopping it via Central Admin GUI

If you've stopped the Central Administration service within the GUI, here's how you get it started again:

From the command prompt type (assumming STSADM path is defined in environment variables)

stsadm -o provisionservice -action start -servicename WSS_Administration -servicetype Microsoft.SharePoint.Administration.SPWebService

Once this command successfully completes, run an IISREST t

How to force a SQL database log file to shrink via SQL Manager UI

I’ve sometimes found that when trying to shrink a SharePoint SQL via the SQL Management interface, the database refuses to shrink, and in some cases even grows!

A colleague showed me an easy fix today which requires a simple (temporary) change to the database options.

Simply follow these steps (but bear in mind that you are following this advice at your own risk)

1. Ensure you have a FULL backup of the database because you will be essentially "breaking" the full transaction log by carrying out this procedure.
2. Right click the database and choose PROPERTIES, then click on Options
3. Change the Recovery Model to ‘Simple
4. Click OK
5. Right click the DB, select Tasks > Shrink > Files
6. Select ‘Log’ under file type
7. Under shrink action, select ‘Reorganize pages…” and then set the new size to shrink the log down to
8. Click OK and your database log file will be resized.
9. Be sure to change the Recovery Model back to ‘FULL’ when completed’

SharePoint menu fly outs down multiple levels

Just stumbled across a (yet another) great post by Heather Solomon entitled How to Activate the Drop Down Menu in MOSS Sites

I don't want to rehash it, but bascially you can have your SharePoint global navigation dyanamically display multi layers of subsites/pages simply by making a change to the masterpage.

Determine size of SharePoint 2007 Site Collection

One way of quickly determining the physical size of a SharePoint 2007 Site collection is to go to Central Admin > Application Management > Site Collection Quotas and Locks and select the site collection you want to check the size of.

At the bottom of the page, just above the OK and Cancel buttons you will see the 'Current Storage Used' value.