On Tuesday, January 06 I will be presenting a MSDN Webcast as part of the SharePoint for Internet Site Development series. This will take place at 11:00 AM Pacific Time, which is 19.00 PM GMT.
I get all the fun topics, and I will be covering Content Deployment and even doing Content Deployment against a real site live during the Web Cast! :)
The sign up page is:
http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032396926&Culture=en-US
Content deployment enables you to run an Internet-facing site that contains content authored by people on your internal network. This capability enables network separation (for example, firewalls) between the intranet and the Internet-facing network. Internal authors have access to the site so they can author, edit, and approve content, but you want that network (the intranet) shielded from incoming Internet traffic for security purposes. In this webcast, we discuss how to take advantage of content deployment to host content on your Internet site that is authored by people on the internal network.
Presenter: Spencer Harbar, Enterprise Architect, harbar.net
Apologies to all of you who tried to submit comments or contact me through harbar.net over the last couple of weeks. Unfortunately for me this was down to an assortment of issues with my hosting provider, who were unable to offer any reasonable assistance whatsoever. I thought things were a bit quiet and I have been suffering all manner of problems with the hoster since their “platform upgrade”. On my return to work after Christmas I did a bunch of tests and after yet more ineptitude on the hoster’s part I gave up and switched the site to someone decent.
So hopefully normal service is now resumed.
I keep getting sandbagged by folks on the topic of the SharePoint Central Administration (SPCA) application, and there is still considerable confusion about how SPCA should be best deployed within a farm topology, how to make it “Highly Available” and “Secure”. Most of the queries are around what I do in my deployments and what recommendations I have for SPCA. Therefore this article covers these topics along with some additional discussion and general recommendations.
- Running Central Administration on more than one server in the farm.
- Correcting the Central Administration AAM Collection
- Modifying the CentralAdministrationURL Registry key.
- Providing “Highly Available” SPCA using Network Load Balancing
- Running Central Administration on the standard Port
- Running Central Administration over SSL.
- Isn’t coming in over the Public LAN a risk?
- Right, so what about Kerberos?
- Other Recommendations
SharePoint Central Administration: High Availability, Load Balancing, Security & General Recommendations
Adam Buenz over on SharePoint Shelter has a nice post titled When Best Practices Aren’t Best Practices. It’s a good read, and pretty much all he says I agree with. There are a few things he doesn’t touch on that I feel like highlighting however, so here goes…
The key problem is the term itself. “Best Practices”. I’ve always hated it. “Best Practices”, says who? :) There’s nothing funnier than someone who has been practicing a particular technology for six months spouting off about them. Well actually there is, and that’s the vendor spouting off about them, especially when the so called best practice is supporting their latest attempt to cover up a weakness in the product.
As I keep telling people (some of whom are listening) Software is about tradeoffs and compromise. One person’s “best practice” maybe a terrible practice for someone else’s scenario.
Unfortunately of late the SharePoint world has a fetish for “Best Practices”. It’s probably one of the babble speak terms you will hear most often (apart from the equally disturbing “governance: of course), usually being spouted by consultants. In the introduction to the all-round pretty damn decent SharePoint Server 2007 Best Practices book, Ben Curry says:
“As you’ll see when you read this book, there is a fine line between best practices and design decisions……
…..at some point, design concepts and best practices are intermingled. At other times, best practices are presented with a notation that other design choices might be possible and might be the best choice given a different scenario.”
He tells it like it is. This might seem like stating the obvious. But the trouble with stating the obvious, is that it more often than not, is nowhere near obvious enough. If it was obvious, it wouldn’t need stating, now would it?!
SharePoint is a complex technology stack, MOSS isn't a product, it’s eight products. It’s got a lot of stuff. It’s got a lot of great stuff (that no one else has got) and it’s got a lot of rough edges. It’s a complex beast.
Most importantly, and I don’t give a monkeys what the vendor presales folk tell you, SharePoint is not a point solution, in any scenario. It’s a platform upon which you build solutions for your business requirements. This doesn’t necessarily mean you need to write code.
Because the “Best Practices” term has become such a vouge in the SharePoint world there are a few key symptoms:
- Inexperienced consultants who did something that worked once, so they pimp their approach as a best practice, when it’s nothing of the sort.
- A couple hundred thousand project managers implementing SharePoint across the globe want easy answers for difficult questions, so ask “What’s the best practice for XYZ?”
- The vendor spouts “best practices” to cover themselves in terms of supportability and services headaches.
Now don’t get me wrong, there are plenty of real best practices out there in SharePoint land. Many of them produced by the vendor. However you simply must not take them lock, stock, the whole lot. They are guidelines for the most part, and must be considered carefully as part of your overall solution and take into account all aspects of your deployment.
Adam talks about best practices often not considering industry verticals or company culture. These are less tangible aspects which are very important to any SharePoint deployment, which after all is about changing, embracing or effecting culture. The “new world of work” the vendor liked to say before they ditched that spin. I though I’d add my views towards some of the more tangible aspects of SharePoint deployments….
1. There are some best practices which are applicable to every single SharePoint deployment. Especially when it comes to infrastructure areas. For example you absolutely should be using single affinity (sticky sessions) in load balanced environments. However for pretty much every other aspect it’s not so cut and dry. Recently there was a bit of a blog battle regarding Site Definitions, there is no black and white – it’s all shades of grey. Again, compromise and tradeoffs.
2. There are no easy answers to difficult questions.
Often times I get emails from folk asking about some development related activity they are trying to get working in SharePoint. The message usually goes something like, “I am attempting to customize the navigation to include external resources from a external system and SharePoint is messing it up, what is the best practice for including such resources within my SharePoint site navigation.”
For that, my friends, what might seem a simple thing is nothing of the sort and simply cannot be answered without in depth analysis, and besides there is no best practice here. There are no easy answers to difficult questions, unless you count the default answer of a “security consultant”, which is of course, “no”. :)
3. Some aspects of SharePoint have solid best practices.
Some scenarios targeted by SharePoint, e.g. Collaboration Portals, have mature, proven best practices which have been refined over years of successful deployments. The sweet spot of the current release is this scenario. There was a solution accelerator for the previous release and the core content on release was in this space. That stuff is solid. It’s proven. However it’s still just a blue print or framework to base your deployment on and extend. Some folks take this and deploy it as is and be successful, but they are the minority, everyone else is building on top of it to meet their business requirements.
4. Some aspect of SharePoint absolutely do not have any best practices.
It’s plainly ridiculous to suggest that some features of the product have associated best practices. Why? Well, it’s simple. because they haven’t been around long enough, and they haven’t been deployed enough yet. You can’t have best practices for things which have only been available for a couple years. It’s not long enough. They are not mature enough.
Take Excel Services for example, that’s only been about for a couple years and is extremely broad. At launch the product group suggested separate ECS app servers were the best bet (reasonable bet hedging that). Now it’s more common to hear them talking about using ECS on the WFE servers. the whole conversation is totally bogus anyway as it depends upon the complexity and latency of the calculations you are performing. If you are just using EWA to display non intensive calcs like sums and so forth, then WFE is the right place, but if it’s some crazy sales projections coming from multiple external sources, it’s another story.
Another example is Document Conversions. If any one tells you there’s a best practice there then they are full of it. Sorry, but it’s how it is. The only best practice in these types of scenarios is how to approach the planning and measurement of a given deployment and taking it from there. And those are thin on the ground.
I’m sure this post will noise some folks up, but it is important to take best practices with a pinch of salt, and verify them alongside the specifics of your project, and remember there are no stupid questions, only stupid answers.
Don’t get me wrong I am fan of best practices, but only if they are truly tried, tested, proven and validated. And just by using the term or label doesn’t make it so. It is important to soak up as much as possible that can help you be successful with SharePoint, and the aforementioned book and the SharePoint Best Practices conferences are some of the best ways to do so.
The bottom line however is to have a deployment/implementation that works and meets your business requirements. If you have that then you have the best practice for your organization. And that is the only thing that matters.
There’s a bunch of cool stuff coming in Windows 7 if the things they showed and talked about at PDC make it into the final release. But there’s plenty of things which are reasonably basic which I believe would make things much better, especially on a laptop. I no longer have a desktop running Vista. My laptop is my desktop (and my laptop when on the road) and this is increasingly common.
Don’t get me wrong there’s plenty of things I like about Vista and I’m not one of these XP is better fan boy freaks who hated XP until Vista shipped. I also like some of the cool new stuff, but to my mind there’s not much point doing all the cool new stuff (like touch) if you can’t get the basics down. It’s the basics that frustrate users, and a modern general purpose client OS shouldn’t frustrate users. That is not the “magic of software”. In addition, I like Mac OS, but there’s also plenty of things that suck about that, which I’ll probably rant about at some point.
In other words, this is just a (not to be taken too seriously) list of things I want fixed. And yes, I have submitted all of these formally to the Windows Engineering team.
1. Improved Start Up time
Why exactly does it take so long to boot Vista? You know the story, you do a fresh install and everything is nice and quick. Then you load up all your apps and it turns into a disaster zone, waiting often four to five minutes just to get the logon screen. Then you log on and it’s another four minutes before you can actually use the computer properly as all the start up items are loaded and you sit there looking at the blue doughnut of death. Now I know why this happens. On my machines I have this down, I have a useable desktop from boot in about three minutes, but I know what I’m doing and have tweaked my machine with Autoruns. I remove all the spyware “reminder” crap and anything else I don’t want. I’ve also set delays on the apps I care less about. Also my Services are tweaked and I have autoruns profiles for different uses of the laptop, for example when I’m on the road I am running the “undocked” profile which doesn’t run the Tablet services.
But the point is, I shouldn’t have to do all this work. Windows should, because it’s the Operating System and that’s what Operating Systems (modern ones at any rate) are supposed to do. Of course this does require some buy in from ISVs (stop putting crap in startup etc). At the very least Vista should give me a proper UI to configure these things
2. Docked/Undocked Profiles for laptops
Can’t believe this feature doesn’t exist. Just because I don’t have a docking station, doesn’t mean I don’t want profiles for things like power management, services to run etc when I’m on the road versus when I’m plugged in at home and connected to a monitor etc. No “computer manufacturer’s job” wuss out excuses, build this capability. Why else have a Windows Mobility Center (Windows X)?
3. Decent Power Management
When I’m on battery I should be running in Power Saver mode, when I’m plugged in I should be running in High Performance mode. When I’m on battery I don’t want Sidebar. Oh and I want this to be automatic. Why is this so hard? So Vista switches Aero Glass off when in Power Saver, but I have to switch to that mode myself. That’s silly. I know, I know the big blue monster will say – that’s the computer manufacturer’s job. But it isn’t. I can use Vista Battery Saver from Codeplex, but either way that cool widget or the laptop manufacturer’s widget – they both run as a little widget (see complaint number one). This should be part of Windows, period. Oh and make some of the apps like Sidebar not consume ridiculous power even when only one gadget is open.
4. Erm, fix Hibernate and Sleep
They don’t work very well. What is up with Vista simply displaying a blank screen when you do hibernate? I mean come on, which UI genius decided that would be a good idea? If your laptop has no HDD light or other status indicator you can’t tell your machine is on unless you listen to the HDD etc, and on my machine they are very quiet. STOP BLANKING THE SCREEN, that’s really stupid. Now I’m kinda losing interest in hibernate as I have 6Gb RAM, but sleep should be decent.
5. Autodetect Optical Out.
If the machine has a digital audio out using the same socket as for the analog 3.5 speaker jack then sense when an optical cable is attached and switch to the high definition output from speakers. Having to do this manually is frankly just idiotic. There is no good reason not to implement this.
6. A decent remove removable device
When I click Safely Remove Hardware (e.g. a portable USB disk) that means I want to remove it. Not sit there clicking “it’s in use, please try again”. This feature is downright pathetic. On Mac I do Apple-E and the thing (whatever it is) that’s using it is killed, because that’s what I told it to do. On Vista this capability is practically useless.
7. Decent multi monitor support.
Nuff said. Just do it. Acquire Ultramon.
8. Ship Anti Virus for free as part of the Operating System
I already know you want to do this. I don’t care about those other “security vendors”. Of course you need governments to let you do this. If we are in the “cloud” age there should be no general purpose client operating system on the market that doesn’t include AV. Stuff Symantec et all.
There you go, eight “small” things I’d like to see instead of bringing the Ribbon to the font control panel :) I’m pretty sure I’ve forgotten a bunch, but these would make me very happy.
I am happy!
The excellent Sony Reader comes with a bit of software – the eBook Library – think of it like iTunes for books. It’s nowhere near as evil as iTunes, but not exactly the greatest bit of software ever built. Anyways it let’s you buy books from Sony and stick them on the Reader. Note you don’t need this – there are two other programs for transferring books. However if you wish to purchase books from Sony (which I do) then you need it.
Trouble is previous versions didn’t install on x64. Yet another example of idiot vendors not having it together. Like many other things there was a workaround to get it working. The trouble with that was every time a new release came out you had to faff about.
But today I notice Sony have shipped v2.5 of the eBook Library. And it works! :) No hacks, no unpacking installers. It just installs. I’m *amazed* they got this sorted. Really! Such a simple thing, but it’s been outstanding for so long. Nice one Sony. About time thou!
By now you should definitely have your nuggin’ around SharePoint updates, and be on a decent build. A decent build like the Infrastructure Updates, or better yet the October Cumulative Updates. Of course there are some more coming in a couple weeks. Keep up to date with my Post SP1 hot fixes article here.
The trouble is lots of folk don’t bother and are still running RTM. Oh dear! However this is understandable, a lot of customers are running quite happily (don’t laugh, there are some, really!!) and don’t like the idea of installing patches and (shudder) bouncing boxes.
Trouble is, if you are still running RTM on January 13th 2009 (not long from now) you won’t get any support from the vendor. So don’t act like you didn’t know and go get your boxes sorted out. Maybe use the xmas holibags to do it but be wary of those xmas change “freezes”. :)
Microsoft Support Lifecycle for their products
After January 13th, 2009 support can only be provided for systems which have SP1 installed!
I am delighted to be speaking again at the second Best Practices™ SharePoint Conference in San Diego, CA, February 2nd thru 4th 2009.
The first Best Practices™ SharePoint Conference in Washington, D.C., was a great success with awesome speakers, community events and a fantastic turnout of knowledgeable attendees. What really set this conference apart was it’s independent nature and it’s focus on real world, best practices from field deployments. This conference is not Tech Ed where a bunch of marketing folks talk up their features. This is all about the down and dirty how to make it work, the gotchas, and most of all best practices for successful deployments. Big shout out to Ben Curry for organizing a great event.
The speaker line up speaks for itself, go check out the who’s who of SharePoint experts over on the conference site. Whilst you’re at it check out the agenda for an idea of the superb content which will be presented.
In addition to this, we have a great location – the Hilton La Jolla at Torrey Pines – nice! I may even be able to sneak in a round of golf before heading out to Redmond for three weeks of fun after the event.
I’ll be presenting the following sessions at the event:
- ITP327, Best Practices for Implementing Kerberos in a SharePoint Environment - Part One
with my buddy and fellow SharePoint Infrastructure junkie Bob Fox. This session will introduce Kerberos implementation best practices for SharePoint Deployments and configuration aids. - ITP327, Best Practices for Implementing Kerberos in a SharePoint Environment - Part Two
with my buddy and fellow SharePoint Infrastructure junkie Bob Fox. The second part will cover more in-depth scenarios and advanced configuration, troubleshooting and little known tips, tricks and tweaks for operating a Kerberos SharePoint environment. - DEV435, Go Live! Launching your MOSS Publishing site.
This one is for developers and will cover best practices for taking your SharePoint WCM solution from development into production on the Internet, covering tips, tricks and gotchas common to all public facing MOSS deployments. In depth examples of deployment, performance, and security. In addition some of the powerful new capabilities of IIS 7 will be demonstrated. - ITP361, MythBusters – debunking common SharePoint Farm Misconceptions.
Another chance to catch my popular interactive session which dives into common SharePoint Farm Myths and discuss common misconceptions around Global Deployments, Farm Topologies, Shared Service Providers, High Availability, Security and more. Alongside best practices for each “myth”, the SharePoint “magic numbers” will be covered and there will be plenty of scope to discuss any particular queries you may have on farm deployment. This material is being refreshed and bought bang up to date for the second Best Practices™ SharePoint Conference. - ITP250, IT Pro Experts Panel.
I will be joining Bob Fox, Mark Ferraz, Ben Curry, Daniel Webster, and Todd Klindt for this popular panel session where you can bring your toughest questions and problems! This 'open mic' session is an opportunity to ask the experts!
I’m really looking forward to another great Best Practices™ SharePoint Conference. If you are doing SharePoint this is a must attend event. However, be warned, space is limited and the event is likely to sell out pretty quick, so get yourself over to the conference site and get registered. For those of you who can’t make it out to the United States, check out the European Best Practices™ SharePoint Conference, which I will be blogging about in the near future.
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My buddy Nick Swan went and tagged me with one of these meme things. This time I’m supposed to come up five Christmas pressie recommendations – primarily gadgets. It was a bit tricky but here goes.
1. Sony PRS700 – electronic book reader.
The Sony Reader is by far and away the best electronic book reader on the market, I’ve tried all of them. If you can live with the Sony ebook store limitations (which aren’t that bad actually, and of course you don’t have to use it!) it’s the mustard. I don’t have this one yet as it’s only just out in the US. The 505 is superb, and this model introduces a built in LED light and touch screen. What they haven’t done is loose all the great features and ergonomics of the 500/505.
2. iRobot Roomba – robot hoover
I don’t have one of these, but I want one :) It’s a hoover – or vacuum cleaner, but it does it for you when you’re out of the house :)
3. Shure SE530 Earphones – the mut’s nuts when it comes to personal monitors
I noticed both Nick and Rob raved about some headphones they like and thought I’d redress the balance by including these earphones. They are basically pro stage monitors without the custom flange. They don’t do noise cancelling (that would be silly) but with a proper fit they are simply stunning. Incredible range with immense ability at high frequency. I don’t have this exact set – I got their “pro” equivalent courtesy of the manufacturer but as far as I can tell they are identical. Throw those crappy iPod bundled “earphones” in the trash and get these.
4. Buffalo TeraStation Pro – 4Tb NAS
Got a lot of media? This is awesome – 4Tb of NAS – sure you can build out your own but why bother? This is a vey nice unit and has the capacity (at least for the time being) to store all my tunes, videos and software. Nice!
5. Wired Subscription.
OK, not a gadget, but I’m frequently amazed how many people in the IT industry I meet don’t read Wired. If you like tech it’s simply a must read. Plus it has lots of cool pictures too.
Erm, so that’s it – I managed to do it without talking about a single Apple product :) I need to tag some folks, so I choose:
Many thanks to all those who attended yesterday evening’s SharePoint User Group UK Meeting at the Scottish Parliament. Big shout to Steven Hynds once again for organizing the excellent venue.
As promised, the slide deck for my presentation is now available. For Andrew’s TDD whitepaper, please head on over to his site at www.21apps.com.
If you have feedback on the event, or other suggestions for future topics please post them to the SUGUK forums. We look forward to future SUGUK events in Scotland.