I'm often asked for "best practices" for developing Web Content Management (aka Publishing) sites with MOSS 2007. "Best Practices" is dodgy ground, as the best practice for one given project could very possibly be the worst practice for another. Prescriptive guidance on the other hand is much more useful, MSDN has just published an excellent article in this space authored by my buddy Andrew Connell:
Publishing sites adhere to most, if not all, of the prescriptive guidance and generally accepted best practices for SharePoint sites. However, because of the noncollaborative nature of publishing sites and their generally larger audience, they require additional considerations and planning to be implemented successfully. This article addresses many areas that are specific to deploying successful and scalable publishing sites in the enterprise.
Prescriptive Guidance for SharePoint Server 2007 Web Content Management Sites
I finally got around to updating my list of post SP1 fixes, which is now fully up to date. Well until they make some more that is!
Thanks to all those who attended my session this morning at the Best Practices Conference on Global Taxonomies. As promised, below is a link to the logical architecture design samples, of which I showed a couple. From here you can get the Visio diagrams and also read an in depth article on the design trade offs which led to the example Logical Architecture.
Microsoft SharePoint Team Blog : Investing in Logical Architecture Design Samples
Also, more recently a variation on the above theme has been produced for Twynham School’s solution architecture see the following technical case study resources:
Very late yesterday I found out that Patrick Tisseghem, a friend and one of the world's leading SharePoint authorities had passed away suddenly. Patrick was one of the very best guys - both to work with and to have fun with. He will be greatly missed, and my thoughts are with his family and other friends at this time.
I've done a bunch of geo-dispersed SharePoint deployments recently, and most of them make use of the Global My Sites capability. This works very well, basically by redirecting users to the correct Web Application based on Audiences. Sure there are some limitations within the My Sites, but none that make the geo-distribution of them a poor compromise. However the problem with any solution in this space is the need to manage multiple Farms, and more importantly multiple SSPs. For the My Sites scenario you need a profile import at each SSP, or make use of a "hard to get" tool.
Great news today is that that tool is now available as part of the v2 release of the SharePoint Admin Toolkit, which also features guidance on running multiple SSPs for availability (which you should be doing anyway, but until now has been poorly articulated).
You can check out the toolkit at:
SharePoint Administration Toolkit 2.0 is Now Available! - Zach Rosenfield's SharePoint Blog
FINALLY, a decent solution for SharePoint Reporting - for free! Check it out:
FREE SharePoint Reporting - CardioLog Lite
The visitor segmentation and light javascript implementation are perfect for small to medium size environments, looking to improve the OOTB reporting. Intlock also provide a bunch of other report bundles and paid for versions for more demanding situations. I definitely encourage you to evaluate this edition, which you can download and install on your test machines quickly and painlessly.
My buddy and fellow SharePoint Junkie/MVP, Andrew Woodward, has put together a nice white paper which walks you through the steps necessary to get started with Test Driven SharePoint Development. This is a really good 101 for those who don't know what TDD is all about, or for those that do but are struggling with using it within SharePoint development projects.
This paper is the first in a series that he is putting together, so keep an eye on his blog or better yet, subscribe.
I'm pleased to announce I have joined the board of the International SharePoint Professionals Association (“ISPA”). ISPA is a professional association dedicated to the promotion and global adoption of Microsoft SharePoint Products and Technologies. The Association provides support and guidance to the community by establishing connections between SharePoint professionals and groups, resources, education and information.
I'm very excited to be working with a great team to drive this much needed community initiative, we have lots of great things planned for the near future.
We recently put out a FAQ page that we hope answers some of the questions we have been getting and we will expand on this as we move forward.
Did you know we also offer sites for SharePoint User Groups? Well its true we do. You can submit a request here.
Do you already have an existing User Group and just want it listed on our site? You can submit your information here.
Most importantly ... would you like to be a member? We admit that this is still a work in progress offering with regards to the web site but we are moving forward nicely and hope you will grow with us. You can sign up here.
September 15th - 17th, Washington, DC.
I'm pleased to be presenting a couple sessions at the SharePoint Best Practices Conference this September in Washington, DC. I hope to see some of you there. For more information, please check out the conference web site at http://www.sharepointbestpractices.com/.
It promises to be a great event with some great speakers and excellent material from the real world of SharePoint deployments - not much marketing spin here is what I'm saying :). If you register before August 1st, you'll also get a copy of the recently released MS Press book, SharePoint Best Practices.
My sessions are:
Mythbusters - Debunking Server Farm Myths
(ITP305, CIO305, PM305, IA305)
This highly interactive, whiteboard session will dive 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.
Global Taxonomies with Office SharePoint Server
(ITP317, IA317)
Large enterprises often require the ability to manage their taxonomy and metadata "globally" across their MOSS deployments, and the inherent architecture of SharePoint presents some significant barriers to implementing such a solution in a manner that can scale to the enterprise. This session dives into approaches which address this conundrum along with a number of best practices for bridging the gap between a global taxonomy and the restrictions imposed by SharePoint Site Collections.
...and little if any vendor involvement - just the way it's supposed to be.
Today, well yesterday actually, the International SharePoint Professionals Association officially launched. The Association provides support and guidance to the community by establishing connections between SharePoint professionals and groups, resources, education and information. For more information, visit their web site and be sure to join right away. I'm pleased to be one of the regional leads for EMEA, and want to take this opportunity to thank Bob, Natalya , Darrin and Chris for their efforts getting things off the ground.
http://www.sharepointpros.org/
Announcing the International SharePoint Professionals Association (Bob Fox)
What's the best thing about the recently released Infrastructure Updates for SharePoint 2007? The super cool new search functionality? Content Deployment fixes? Improvements in performance and security?
Nope, none of those me ole china, it's the new support for Kerberos Authentication for the SSP Web Services. This was only previously possible with a heinous hack that I promised I would never detail publicly due to it's nastiness.
The problem was that the SSP Web Services run under a IIS Virtual Web Site with a high port. It's client (the .NET Framework) along with SharePoint was unable to construct the correct request to match the SPNs configured (if you configured them correctly, and not many did). So setting the setsharedwebserviceauthn to negotiate using STSADM would make your SSP Web Services nice and secure, but break your farm. Try doing this and then click Manage Search Service within Application Management and you'll see! (Everything is OK on a single server, but erm, who runs them in production!!).
The Infrastructure Updates address this, and it's now possible to configure the SSP Web Services to use Kerberos. This is a pretty big deal for enterprises who are serious about their farm build and configuration. It's not all great news, as there is an extra step (a reg key). This is something that I will be adding to the SharePoint Kerberos Configuration utility, which as it happens I've been delaying until these updates were shipped.
In addition to the updates, the IT Pro UA folk have done a great job of updating the Kerberos Configuration Guide on Tech Net. The section relevant specifically to this change is at:
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc263449(TechNet.10).aspx#section14