Platform Hygiene
Quite some time ago I posted about the SharePoint “stubs” – a PowerShell module that allows for remote authoring with intellisense within your favourite PowerShell editor (i.e. VS Code!) on a machine that does not have the SharePoint bits installed. This was put together by the SharePointDSC folks ostensibly to help them with unit testing, but it’s much wider use was around being able to create scripts properly and easily on a remote machine. Well, now the OfficeDSC project has done the same thing creating a gargantuan “stub” for the cmdlets available in the following services and frameworks: ...
Here’s a quick update on the issue that occurred during my recent Azure AD and SharePoint sessions at SharePoint Saturday Lisbon and ESPC. For those interested, once I had configured the AAD Enterprise Application and created a Trusted Identity Provider in SharePoint to use it – and attempted a (seemingly successful) login via AAD the glorious Yellow Page of Death was returned by the SharePoint Web Application. It was, perhaps obviously, a basic error – albeit one that is not *that* obvious, especially when you are brutalised by a head cold and a very dodgy furry podium!...
[update] if you use OneDrive to store your Documents – the default on a new install of Windows 10 - you must ensure the WindowsPowerShell folder exists and is set to be “always on this device”. Ahh, SharePoint. Ahh, SnapIns. Yeah. 2009 faxed and before the ink faded, told us the old crap is hanging around like a bad hangover. I hate SnapIns more than most, but that’s a story for another day. For the time being we are stuck with them when working with our “built from the cloud up” versions of SharePoint Server. One of...
Many thanks to everyone who attended the European Collaboration Summit in Mainz, Germany, last month. It’s safe to say that the event overall was a runaway success and yes, we have already started planning for the 2019 edition! At the event, I promised to publish some additional resources. These are a little later than I had hoped but with a new job and a variety of “more important” things on a rather large to-do list, the delay was inevitable. At any rate, this post serves as a landing page for these resources....
Every so often a real blast from the past comes back to haunt me. Usually it’s some obscure “infrastructure” gubbins – you know, the sort of thing that 80% of so called IT Pros knew in 1999. These days thou. Not so much. With SharePoint in particular there is a whole boat load of legacy. Not that legacy is bad. Lot’s of it is awesome. That’s why the product remains so successful. On the other hand some of it is real, real, real nasty! :) It always seems to come in waves. Over the last two weeks...
The building block of every community is a family. Welcome to our family.
See you in Mainz!
Your browser does not support the video tag.
Ahh, Distributed Cache, everybody’s favourite SharePoint service instance, the most reliable and trouble-free implementation since User Profile Synchronization. I jest of course, it’s the most temperamental element of the current shipping release, not to mention the most ridiculous false dependency ever introduced into the product and should be killed as soon as possible. However, it is extremely important to a SharePoint Farm in terms of both functionality and ensuring maximum performance. Even in simple deployments the impact of the Search and LogonToken related caches can provide ~20% performance and throughput improvements. But what to do when it’s busted? Once...
One of the most common requests I have received over the last couple years has been how to leverage PowerShell to get User Photos from Active Directory (or any other location really) into the SharePoint User Profile Store. With the removal of User Profile Synchronization (UPS) in SharePoint 2016 this need has increased significantly. For most mid market customers this is a key requirement, and implementing Microsoft Identity Manager (MIM) for this purpose is not practical. I did spend a whole bunch of time before the release of SharePoint 2016 attempting to convince the powers that be, that Active...
Introduction For about a year now I’ve been plagued by people asking me how to configure a partitioned User Profile Application (UPA) in SharePoint Server 2016, and perform successful profile import using Active Directory Import (ADI). Every few weeks someone asks for the configuration, and it basically got to the point where it made sense to post this article to which I can refer folks. Now, I am not going to provide all up coverage here. I expect you to be familiar with the fundamental concepts of SharePoint Multi-Tenancy. You can head over to my other articles here...
When leveraging Microsoft Identity Manager (MIM) and the SharePoint Connector for User Profile Synchronization, some customers have a requirement to import profile pictures from the thumbnailPhoto attribute in Active Directory. This post details the correct way of dealing with this scenario, whilst retaining the principle of least privilege. The configuration that follows is appropriate for all of the following deployments: SharePoint 2016, MIM 2016, and the MIM 2016 SharePoint Connector SharePoint 2013, MIM 2016, and the MIM 2016 SharePoint Connector SharePoint 2013, FIM 2010 R2 SP1 and...
Today, Microsoft released Service Pack 1 for Microsoft Identity Manager 2016 (MIM). This is an extremely important release for SharePoint practitioners who are looking to leverage MIM for User Profile Synchronization with SharePoint Server 2016. This Service Pack provides a significantly streamlined deployment process – no more hotfix rollups (well, for the time being :)). This is important for those leveraging simply the Synchronization Service, but also for those working with declarative provisioning using the MIM Portal and Service – SharePoint Server 2016 support is also included, as is support for SQL Server 2016. Service Pack 1 can...
As many of you are aware there is a “toolset” published on GitHub which provides one way to get up and running using Microsoft Identity Manager 2016 (MIM) for profile synchronization with Active Directory. This Windows PowerShell Module and exported MA configurations basically provisions a base capability more or less akin to what shipped with SharePoint 2013’s User Profile Synchronization capability. I’m not much of a fan of this Module or it’s approach. Seriously, if a customer is going down the road of implementing MIM they better be sure they have the right skills in place – and right...
Back in the middle of March, Microsoft released a Hotfix Rollup for Microsoft Identity Manager 2016 (MIM). This hotfix rollup is version 4.3.2195.0. This is an extremely important build for those leveraging MIM for profile synchronization with SharePoint Server 2016. You can get the bits over at KB313475. There are numerous articles out there suggesting that you should install build 4.3.2064.0. Don’t! 4.3.2195 is the fix package you need. Make this part of your base build of the MIM Sync server. However, if you already have MIM Sync setup and you want to apply this patch, make sure...
Zero Downtime Patching (ZDP) in SharePoint Server 2016 has a marketing heavy silly name, but it's actually sweetness on a stick.
Whilst I hate the name, it is accurate in respect to the basics of the new patching process and the changes made in 2016 to support it. Now as to whether a customer would actually perform real world patching operations with such an expectation is another matter entirely. Here's a hint: they wouldn't. There's a lot more to patching an environment than updating the bits of the software. Or there should be, otherwise you shouldn't be running the environment....
In SharePoint 2013, the Distributed Cache size is set to half of ten percent of the total RAM on the server. This means that on a server with 8Gb RAM, the Cache Size (the allocation for data storage) is 410Mb. Another 410Mb is used for the overhead of running the Cache. This is a reasonable default as the system has no way of knowing which other services will be provisioned onto the server. And of course by default in SharePoint 2013 every machine in the farm will host Distributed Cache, unless you build your farm properly using the –SkipRegisterAsDistributedCacheHost...
Whilst I have some much more in depth coverage of SharePoint 2016 coming soon, this is the first in a mini series of “nuggets” – tidbits of information on the new release. Unlike with previous releases I decided against publishing a lot of material whilst the product was in public preview and to wait until the RTM. This decision was driven by a number of factors I won’t bore you with. Many will be of the opinion that not a great deal has changed in SharePoint 2016. That is somewhat true, especially in respect to visible end user...
A couple of weeks ago I posted about the Playbook Imperative and Changing the Distributed Cache Service Identity, which generated a lot of interest and feedback regarding the “tooling approach” presented. The original intention of the post was to articulate the importance of understanding the playbook when performing operational service management of SharePoint farms. I had never intended to show “how to do it” in terms of creating tooling in Windows PowerShell. The PowerShell examples were created purely to demonstrate the playbook and were deliberately done in a way that meant the focus was on the tasks being performed rather...
Introduction One of the most common challenges facing those operating production SharePoint environments is the “missing playbook”. Even for deployments where operational service management (OSM) skills are strong it is impossible to deliver quality operational service without the playbook. It’s generally pretty uncommon for practitioners to factor OSM considerations into the design, or at least to do it well. Indeed, in many cases it is also impossible to do so completely as so much about the environment will not be known or understood prior to broad platform adoption. Whilst the playbook is imperative for any system, there is...
Recently I’ve done a few pieces of work with SharePoint 2013 Business Intelligence and I have also delivered the “legendary”* Kerberos and Claims to Windows Service talk a few times this year. This reminded me to post my Windows PowerShell snippets for the required Active Directory configuration. This topic area is perhaps one of the most misunderstood areas of SharePoint Server, and there is an utterly staggering amount of misinformation, out of date information, single server documentation and good old fashioned 100% bullshit out there. That’s a surprise with SharePoint stuff, huh? Every guide or document out there...
…what you don’t know can hurt you bad, take it from me you’ll be walkin’ around sad. Great tune, but Terry Lewis’ bass can’t help you or your customers when Office 365 hits the skids. Most of you will now be familiar with the common valid arguments against “cloud” services such as Office 365, particularly those from the enterprise. However one of the common invalid arguments is around service availability and reliability. I can’t count the number of times I have had this conversation with customers over the last two years or so. In almost all cases it’s a...
If you haven’t already grabbed it, just a quick note to let you know that Microsoft put an update of the ULS Viewer tool out recently. For quite a while the tool had been removed from code.msdn.microsoft.com and those who had “lost” a copy had to resort to annoying others to get it. ULS Viewer, as I’ve written previously is an essential tool for working with SharePoint. The new version has a number of tweaks including viewing across a farm, rather than manually having to configure that up. Go get it! ULS Viewer download Bill’s post...
One of the most significant “IT Pro” or infrastructure related announcements at the recent SharePoint Conference in Las Vegas was related to a change in supportability for using SQL Server Always On for SharePoint databases, and in particular the use of Asynchronous replication in Business Continuity Management (BCM) scenarios. This is a HUGE deal. Of course, it’s not sexy, it doesn’t directly provide SharePoint IT Pros with a new tool in their belt, and it doesn’t expand deployment scenarios like the announcement relating to 1TB site collections in Office 365. However it is perhaps the single most important piece...
Audience: SharePoint Administrators, Infrastructure Architects and Support Professionals. The esteemed Microsoft Certified Master certification is no longer obtainable... but you can still get master-class mentoring through our collection of Advanced Workshops. Delivered by one of the world's foremost SharePoint authorities, this workshop is a rare opportunity to learn from a recognised master in the field. This module provides 360 coverage of Distributed Cache, the new foundational and pre-requisite service instance in SharePoint 2013 which is an implementation of Windows Server AppFabric Caching, and provides in memory caching across a farm. Understand the background of this service, its...
[Updated 19/02 with session timeslots and an additional session] Vegas, March, 10,000 SharePoint people. What could possibly go wrong?! The big daddy is back, SharePoint Conference 2014 promises to be another great event, and I am once again happy to be speaking at the biggest SharePoint conference on the planet. I get asked a lot about which conferences are worth the money and so on, and of course being the official show, and with the associated travel and accommodation expenses SPC is often in the “requires justification” bucket. Seriously there is no debate, it’s worth it. If you...
Just a quick note to let you know I’ve updated my Antivirus and SharePoint 2013 post, with the details of all the current available options. Instead of the *single* option we had shortly after RTM, there are now four options with hopefully another one in the near future. s.
In the previous parts of this article we covered the core concepts and critical considerations, creating a Workflow Manager Farm using Auto Generated Certificates and converting that farm to use Domain CA issued certificates. This part will cover the end to end configuration of a Workflow Manager Farm using Domain CA issued certificates. This is of particular importance to those who have an organisational policy in force which prohibits the use of self signed or auto generated certificates. Whilst we can change an existing farm which uses auto generated certificates to use Domain CA issued certificates, it is NOT...
In the previous parts of this article we covered the core concepts along with high availability, certificate and SharePoint considerations for Workflow Manager Farms, and the end to end configuration using Auto Generated Certificates. If you are not familiar with this material, make sure to read it before continuing as I assume you have done so! This part will cover switching the existing Workflow Manager farm to using Domain CA issued certificates. Whilst this part is intended as primarily step by step configuration guidance, I will take the opportunity to also explain a few things which didn’t make...
This second part will cover the deployment of a highly available, SSL, Workflow Manager Farm for SharePoint 2013 using auto generated certificates and Network Load Balancing. As discussed in part one, this is the most suitable deployment model for the majority of SharePoint On-premises customers. In addition it is also the easiest way to deploy for production. Whilst this part is intended as primarily step by step configuration guidance, I will take the opportunity to also explain a few things which didn’t make sense to cover in part one. Workflow Manager Farms for SharePoint...
There’s not a lot of high quality documentation for Workflow Manager 1.0. What exists is generally accurate, however it’s the key missing information and lack of detail which presents challenges in the field. During the initial content development work for the MCSM: SharePoint it became clear there is a very large gap with respect to actually implementing the high level deployment guidance provided by the vendor. Following recent discussions in the MCSM: SharePoint community more generally, the topic again raised its head and led to the publication of this article. This guide is an attempt to help address that...
I keep getting asked about how to use Request Management in SharePoint 2013 to configure a dedicated “crawl front end”. In other words how to use RM to ensure that your search crawl traffic gets sent to a specific machine or machines in the farm, which do not serve end user requests. Hopefully you already know that by simply turning on RM on your Web Servers in your farm and with no additional configuration, you get health based routing for free. And this is health based routing that actually works, unlike the default configuration of the most popular “intelligent”...
With the discontinuation of Forefront Protection for SharePoint, Microsoft no longer provides a streaming antivirus solution for SharePoint. This has lead to an ever increasingly common customer question, “what do I use for SharePoint antivirus?”. This post aims to detail the options (right now there is only one) as opposed to answering the question repeatedly. It is NOT intended to be a discussion on why you need a streaming antivirus solution for SharePoint, which is potentially a post for another day. For now, assume you have that requirement, so what are the options? SharePoint 2013 introduces NO CHANGES to...
Recently Service Pack 1 for Forefront Identity Manger (FIM) 2010 R2 shipped. For IdM heads, this is really good news. Along with a bunch of interesting updates and new bits and bobs it is now possible to run FIM on Windows Server 2012 and also to run the FIM Portal component on SharePoint 2013. This article discusses why this is important in a FIM deployment along with the key design considerations. We will also cover how to prepare SharePoint 2013 for the deployment of the FIM Portal, and finally the installation of the Portal itself. ...
One of the most common requests I get is for an update to my article SharePoint Central Administration: High Availability, Load Balancing, Security & General Recommendations to cover SharePoint 2010 and 2013. Most folks are interested in the SSL parts, which has changed a little bit mainly due to the introduction of Windows PowerShell management in SharePoint 2010. This reasonably short post will walkthrough the configuration steps necessary. It’s all very straightforward, however there are a couple of critical considerations which I will point out as we go through the steps. Updated 14/02/2013 to include Windows PowerShell for...
SharePoint Server 2013 introduces a new capability called Request Management. Request Management allows SharePoint to understand more about, and control the handling of, incoming requests. Request Management employs a rules based approach, which enables SharePoint to take the appropriate action for a given request based upon administrator supplied configuration. This new article series will provide comprehensive coverage of the new Request Management capability in three parts: Feature Capability and Architecture Overview Example Scenario and Configuration Step by Step Deployment Considerations and Recommendations Please...
Critical Path Training have been running a series of SharePoint 2013 Office Hours, where you get a chance to ask your burning questions regarding the new version. I’m happy to be doing one of these along with my good friend Andrew Connell on September 18th at 2pm Eastern – that’s 7pm GMT or 8pm CET. The subject is What’s new in SharePoint 2013 for IT Professionals. Ask your infrastructure and operations questions about the new version of SharePoint here! We'll look at the highlights for IT Pros in the 2013 release along with coverage of...
I’m always being asked about tools. Tools to help me cheat, tools to help me be quicker, tools to avoid the need for thinking. Tools that make a SharePoint person’s life better. That sorta thing. Often times tools I will mention have nothing to do with SharePoint, but are simply what I consider to be core elements of operating a Windows based infrastructure. One set of those tools are the Sysinternals utilities from Microsoft. Since day dot of my life as a Windows NT monkey, I’ve used these. Every box has them. I was using Windows Live Mesh to...
The best free SharePoint magazine published online, the DIWUG SharePoint e-Magazine, have released their seventh edition. As usual this is a great edition with a mix of articles written by SharePoint community members. I contributed a two part article series, of which part two is featured in this magazine: Real World Service Application federation with SharePoint 2010 Part Two In the 6th edition of DIWUG eMagazine (#6) Part One of this article covered the basic capability of Service Application Federation along with the required configuration. Following on from part one,...
In the first part of this article series I covered the feature capability and provided an architecture overview of Request Management, a new capability introduced with SharePoint Server 2013. Request Management allows SharePoint to understand more about, and control the handling of incoming requests. This second part details an example scenario and provides a step by step of the necessary configuration. Please note that this article applies to SharePoint Server 2013 RTM. Feature Capability and Architecture Overview Example Scenario and Configuration Step by Step (this article) Deployment...
SharePoint 2013 Preview introduces a number of new elements and considerations for multi tenancy deployments. This article is intended as a companion to my Rational Guide to Multi Tenancy with SharePoint 2010 article series and will cover what’s new and changed in this release with respect to configuration and functionality. It is assumed you are familiar with the material in the article series. This article is verified against SharePoint 2013 RTM. Multi Tenancy with SharePoint 2013: What’s new and changed s.
I will be posting an update to my UPS guide for SharePoint Server 2013 Preview in the near future. I had long planned to update it with better writing and more up to date details anyway. However as I’ve already received a bucket load of questions on this already I wanted to post a quick note to hopefully stem the flow a little bit. When I say UPS, I mean the User Profile Synchronization service instance. The wrapper for FIM along with it’s configuration UI in Central Administration (which is part of the UPA). This is distinct from the...
Since the release of SharePoint Server 2010, the maintenance of the User Profile Service Application (UPA) Sync DB has been extremely problematic. I’m not talking about “standard” database maintenance tasks here, you know those routine tasks you should be performing on your environment but that seldom are implemented by those running operational service :). This is all about the Sync DB retaining data that it shouldn’t. There is quite a lot of confusion out there surrounding this topic in general and it has certainly hit a lot of customers, hard. The fundamental issue stems from the choice of the...
My buddy and all round decent bloke, Kirk Evans, a PFE from Texas way has put together a great blog post on Host Named Site Collections (HNSC) in SharePoint 2010. This should be considered essential reading for SharePoint infrastructure types (IT Pros as Microsoft so offensively buckets them :)). HNSC are often referred to as Host header site collections, and are greatly misunderstood by the field at large. Indeed some SharePoint “experts” have recently made some rather silly statements about them, suggesting they should be avoided. Admittedly many moons ago there were statements about that from Microsoft...
The best free SharePoint magazine published online, the DIWUG SharePoint e-Magazine, have released their sixth edition. As usual this is a great edition with a mix of articles written by SharePoint community members. I contributed a two part article series, of which part one is featured in this magazine: Real World Service Application federation with SharePoint 2010 Part One One of the most powerful new infrastructure capabilities in SharePoint Server 2010 is that of Service Application Federation. Enabled by the new Service Application ...
iThings – they are everywhere, you know it and I know it! There’s not been a enterprise SharePoint deployment I’ve been involved with over the last 18 months where the topic hasn’t reared it’s head. Finally someone has a decent toolset that actually considers business requirements rather than just hype. Check out this upcoming webcast around the area for more details: The iPad invasion is here, ready or not. Used for an increasingly wide range of business applications, iPads can be found at every level, from executives to assistants, board members to sales teams. ...
As a small but significant follow up to my UPA session at the SharePoint Conference in Anaheim last month, is that yesterday we pushed out an update to the Database types and descriptions article on TechNet to finally detail that synchronous mirroring of the Social database IS 100% supported. As already detailed in this document, the Profile database already supported synchronous mirroring. That leaves the Sync database, which if you were paying attention in the session we really don’t care about in terms of “HA” or “DR”. Not perfect by a long shot but you can now officially...
As promised during my sessions at the SharePoint Conference in Anaheim last week, here are the Windows PowerShell scripts demonstrated. Please note that these scripts are direct copies of those on my Virtual Machines. You *will* need to tweak them for use on your environments, and remember they are authored for the purposes of demonstration! If you wish to take pieces of them to use in a real deployment, they will need some work. The scripts are provided as is, without any warranties! You know the score. SPC407: Enterprise Deployment Considerations for the User Profile Service Application. ...
SharePoint Conference 2011 is in full effect here in sunny Anaheim, CA. Following this morning’s keynote it is worth pointing you in the direction of a couple absolute must haves which were released today as part of the overall festivities. First up is the Scale Test Report for Very Large Scale Document Repositories white paper which describes the design and implementation of a 120 million (count em) item, 30Tb farm – the same farm that was used in the keynote HA demo. The number of times I’ve had to discuss “scalability limits” of SharePoint with customers is frightening, and...
Was chatting to my buddy Rob Foster recently and he was slagging me off for not pointing to the SharePoint Pod Show we recently recorded. So here for you listening pleasure (ahem!) is a discussion about the MCM program, some classic mistakes for SharePoint deployments and even a little bit of cricket! SharePoint MCM, Top 3 mistakes, and User Profile Sync discussion with Spencer Harbar-Episode 63 .
After Tech Ed New Zealand, I’ll be hanging back in Auckland with my good buddy Steve Smith to deliver the Combined Knowledge SharePoint 2010 Advanced Infrastructure Administrator course. This is by no means your regular SharePoint admin training. According to the blurb, “This is a once in a lifetime opportunity to learn from two of the most experienced SharePoint experts in the World today and take your SharePoint knowledge to the next level!” It’s always great fun to work with Steve, and I’m looking forward to delivering this material, which steps away from the usual SharePoint featurisms and...
One of the most common conversations I have with customers, partners and random SharePoint consultants is around the creation of SharePoint Server 2010 User Profile Synchronization Connections. These guys are the key link, or connection string if you will between the User Profile Service Application (UPA) and the connected directory services. A very common complaint is the inability to automate their creation using Windows PowerShell. The good news is that Service Pack 1 (SP1) introduces a couple of new cmdlets which help in this regard. This post looks at these cmdlets and also details why they might not be all...
One of the most common complaints about the User Profile Synchronization service in SharePoint Server 2010 is the time it takes to perform synchronization runs or “sync” for short. This is due to a number of factors not least of which is that by leveraging Forefront Identity Manager (FIM) SharePoint now effectively includes a metadirectory. This is a good thing. However if you are just doing import then there is a huge increase in the time it takes over previous versions which were simply performing an ADSI query and inserting the results into a database. It’s very important to...
One of the best new feature areas of SharePoint Server 2010 was the social computing capabilities delivered by the User Profile Service (UPA). Tags, Ratings, Activities as well as enhancements to the My Sites infrastructure allow enterprises to deliver rich “social” applications with the out of the box capabilities. Furthermore by using these features as building blocks a new class of composite social applications have become possible, enabling the enterprise to leverage social computing for both business benefit and end user happiness. Of course, as with many aspects of SharePoint 2010, with great power comes the need for responsibility...
As I’m sure you are all aware, a couple of days ago Microsoft released Service Pack 1 (SP1) for SharePoint 2010. On the same day the bi-monthly Cumulative Update (CU) – the June 2011 CU - was released. Service Pack 1 of course has been hotly anticipated both by the community and customers alike. Unfortunately these releases have caused mass confusion and much contradictory advice regarding the packages and their installation. This post is simply an attempt to reduce the amount of questions I receive about this topic, or rather have something I can point people to when they...
Planning and implementing Exclusion Filters for SharePoint Server 2010 User Profile Synchronization (UPS) is without doubt one of the most important aspects of any UPS deployment. By making use of Exclusion Filters we can narrow down the objects we sync with. Exclusion Filters reduce the amount of “junk” in the Profile database and can significantly decrease the time taken to perform synchronization runs. I will be posting more about Exclusion Filters in general soon, but for this post I will concentrate on the most commonly used filter – that of the userAccountControl attribute in Active Directory. This is by...
It’s been brought to my attention recently that you all love the User Profile Synchronization service instance in SharePoint Server 2010! :). So much so in fact, that one of the most common requests I get is for more articles on this topic, and in particular details on syncing with directory systems other than Active Directory.
There is very little documentation about syncing with Novell eDirectory. Unfortunately at present TechNet only provides cursory information regarding permissions, and the early White Paper is extremely weak. Neither provide the necessary details to get it running.
This article will walk through the steps needed to...
Recently I’ve been asked a number of times about what happens to accounts deleted from Active Directory with respect to SharePoint 2010 User Profiles, and the User Profile Synchronization service instance. Unfortunately this pretty much isn’t documented at all, and furthermore there is quite a lot of incorrect information and assumptions about this area. There is plenty on how SharePoint 2007 handled things of course, but as regular readers (all two of them) will know, things are mighty different in 2010. The good news is that things are pretty straightforward and this post will walk through the important details.
Let’s take...
From the SharePoint Team Blog: Microsoft has discovered a critical issue in the recently released October Cumulative Updates for SharePoint Server 2010 and Project Server 2010, and we have removed the files from download availability. If you have already downloaded the CU, do not install it. If you have installed the CU, please contact Microsoft Support for assistance. We will be posting additional information about the issue here as soon as we have it, and will make the Cumulative Update available for download again as soon as the issue has been fully resolved. Pretty...
Chris Johnson has put together some natty tooling to help aspiring SharePoint developers get up and running with SharePoint 2010 on Windows 7. Even better, the full source is provided in case you may wish to tweak it some to suit specific needs. Go check it out! Announcing SharePoint Easy Setup for Developers .
As you may already be aware there is a bug when creating the User Profile Service Application (UPA) using Windows PowerShell. This bug prevents the provisioning of the User Profile Synchronization service instance (UPS). In a nutshell, when using Windows PowerShell to create a UPA the Default Schema of the Farm Account on the Sync DB is set incorrectly, and this will lead to an error during provisioning of the UPS later. The following error will be logged to the Application Event Log: “IF EXISTS (SELECT * FROM sys.xml_schema_collections c, sys.schemas s WHERE c.schema_id =...
I am frequently surprised (I know, I shouldn’t be really) just how few SharePoint people know about ULSViewer. Often times someone will be complaining about an error they are experiencing, the conversation goes something like this: SPDude, “Hey man, I’ve got a problem with my SharePoint” Me, “Don’t we all buddy, it’s installed isn’t it… but what’s your problem exactly?” SPDude, “Well when I click on the widget and attempt to configure the coolness, I get ‘an unexpected error has a occurred’” Me, “OK, widget coolness can...
Back about a week after RTM of SharePoint 2010 I published my Rational Guide to implementing SharePoint Server 2010 User Profile Synchronization. This was actually written up long before RTM and was doing the rounds among a circle of SharePoint “insiders”. I then tweaked it for RTM and pushed it out immediately after the SharePoint Evolutions Conference, where I had demoed live the steps.
Amazingly, this article has already been viewed over 260,000 times! An incredible response. Of course the Microsoft documentation in this area is weak at present, and UPS is what you could call a “rough edge” of...
This, the sixth part of the Rational Guide article on multi tenancy, will walk through the creation of feature packs and the provisioning of Tenants for the sample scenario detailed in part three. Provisioning Tenants If you haven’t checked out the previous parts, I strongly encourage you to review them. I won’t repeat information and I assume you have read the previous parts, which are: Feature and Capability Overview Planning your Deployment Example Scenario and what Multi Tenancy brings to the party Configuring...
This, the fifth part of the Rational Guide article on multi tenancy will walk through the creation of the partitioned service applications and the starting of their related service instances for the sample scenario detailed in part three. 5. Creating Partitioned Service Applications If you haven’t checked out the previous parts, I strongly encourage you to review them. I won’t repeat information and I assume you have read the previous parts, which are: Feature and Capability Overview Planning your Deployment Example Scenario and what Multi Tenancy...
This, the fourth part of the Rational Guide article on multi tenancy will start to walk through the configuration of the sample scenario detailed in the previous part. This is where we get into the meat of things. 4. Configuring the base Infrastructure If you haven’t checked out the previous parts, I strongly encourage you to review them. I won’t repeat information and I assume you have read the previous parts, which are: Feature and Capability Overview Planning your Deployment Example Scenario and what Multi Tenancy...
I recently retired my MacBook Pro for a swanky new Dell Precision M6500 “covet”. The MBP has treated me well for the last few years but as a SharePoint person the machine (or indeed the new ones) aren’t up to scratch spec wise. I needed a new mobile rig with 16Gb RAM. I’ve lots of other requirements as well. In the end it came down to the Dell versus the Lenovo, which had broadly similar specs. I won’t go into all the details of why I chose the Dell, but that’s the one I went for. I got the so...
I’m honoured once again to be speaking at the Best Practices Conference, which is taking place in Washington D.C. August 24th thru 27th. The Best Practices Conference is easily the best non Microsoft SharePoint event, and the speaker line up is excellent. If you are implementing SharePoint 2010, you don’t want to miss this show. This year, I’m leading up the Keynote: What the Masters think About SharePoint 2010, which will feature five fellow MCMs all of whom do not work for Microsoft. I will also be presenting the following breakouts, all with updated new content specifically for...
It’s been a bit quiet here recently, one of the reasons for that is I recently attended the first rotation of the Microsoft Certified Master for SharePoint 2010. A number of people have requested that I post my thoughts on this and address some common questions about the certification. Before I get started, I must include another Thrilleresque disclaimer. I am part of the team that produced the MCM for SharePoint 2010. I am an instructor and content owner for six modules. Therefore I have an obvious vested interest in the program. However, this doesn’t change the fact that...
This, the third part of the Rational Guide article on multi tenancy walks through the example scenario which future articles use to show how to build out the multi tenant capabilities of SharePoint Server 2010. I will also highlight the key features in action, providing an overview of what multi tenancy brings to a SharePoint 2010 deployment. If you haven’t checked out the previous parts, I strongly encourage you to review them. I won’t repeat information and I assume you have read the previous parts, which are: Feature and Capability Overview Planning...
In the first part of my Rational Guide to Multi Tenancy with SharePoint 2010 article, I walked through the problem space and discussed the features of SharePoint 2010 that enable multi tenant environments. This can be seen as the “overview” (or perhaps “marketing” :)). As promised this is part two, the idea of which is to walk through how to set it all up along with some general recommendations. Now, as much as I wanted to post this as a single article, it’s just too big. There’s too much to discuss and there’s way too much script. I’m not...
Since I published my article, Rational Guide to implementing SharePoint Server 2010 User Profile Synchronization, I’ve been deluged with email on the topic. All good, it shows me that I chose the right content to post, and that the content has relevance.
However one key aspect keeps coming up over and over again both in these emails and on IM etc. Lots of people after attempting to provision the UPS Service from Services on Server, need to reboot the server before the service is provisioned correctly.
If you are running the UPS Service instance on the machine hosting Central Administration, you MUST...
This second article in my Rational Guide series focuses on the capabilities in SharePoint 2010 which enable the delivery of hosting environments. Hosting is finally a first class citizen in SharePoint 2010, however there isn’t a great deal of material out there on this subject. This article will:
walk through the problem space
discuss the features of SharePoint 2010 that enable multi-tenant environments
provide a step by step guide to setting it all up
give general recommendations for those looking to deliver hosting platforms...
PowerShell for SharePoint 2010 rocks. No, really it does. You hate it at first, but then it’s all pure goodness. But boy, does the UI SUCK! Crap for productivity, crap for demos, just about crap for anything other than lame jokes about old skool shell scripting.
Sure, there are funky PowerShell GUIs out there, but they appear to cost money. The good news is Windows ships with it’s own IDE. This thing is called an ISE – prey how much do marketing people get paid?
Anyway – that’s what I’ve been using for all my demos to show the PowerShell stuff that...
Yalls may be playing around with Service Application Federation with SharePoint 2010 with the shiny new SharePoint Server 2010 bits. This federation is also called publishing and consuming service applications, but as I’m spending a lot of my time of late in PowerPoint, I’m using the buzzword for the time being. However, with the RTM bits there is a fundamental missing piece that is not currently documented on Tech Net. Of course you need to exchange and install the necessary certificates as detailed here. However in order to make it work the consuming farm must have permissions to...
SharePoint 2010 includes a fundamental architectural change from the previous version with the introduction of “Service Applications”. This new architecture has extremely broad and deep consequences for SharePoint practitioners. Unfortunately Service Applications thus far have been poorly explained and documented, and already there are many myths surrounding them. This “In a Nutshell” article is an attempt to distil the core elements down to brass tacks. It is intended primarily for architects and administrators planning their farm topologies, but will also be useful for anyone working with SharePoint 2010. http://www.harbar.net/articles/sp2010sa2.aspx
There's a ton of stuff out there on User Profile Sync in SharePoint Server 2010. Some of it’s good, some of it’s frankly terrible. TechNet has some of the best material, but unfortunately TechNet’s format restrictions are counter-intuitive. Therefore this article presents an end to end, “rational guide” to setting this up.
There are a couple of contentious setup requirements in here. I may discuss those in more depth later. For now, the following steps are required. Don’t try and work around them, UPS will break. The following is the least privilege you can get away with.
This article will also be...
For those that attended a couple of my presentations earlier in the week at the Evolution conference I hit a couple issues, both of which are pretty lame and embarrassing. At the time I promised to post an update here once I'd had the chance to look at the boxes again. FBA login issue. this was purely a problem between keyboard and the stage. I was entering the passwords: Password1 and password. The correct password for John Coltrane was P@ssword1 – due to the complexity requirements of the ASPNETDB. I don’t actually use FBA against ASPNETDB that...
Here are the slides from my presentations at the SharePoint 2010 Evolutions Conference this week in London. I will be updating this page as we get through each day of the show. Monday IT101: Overview of what’s new in SharePoint 2010 for IT Pros (with Neil Hodgkinson). DD105: Multi-Tenancy in SharePoint 2010. Tuesday DD108: Claims based Authentication in SharePoint 2010. IT109: Configuring Managed Metadata Service (with Steve Smith). DEV111: Multilingual solutions with SharePoint 2010. Wednesday IT112: SharePoint 2010 Mythbusters. IT114: Configuring and managing User Profile Synchronization. ...
Quite a long time ago there was a comedy to and fro regarding the non-ability of SharePoint Server 2007 to crawl (or index) Web Applications on non-default ports which had been configured to use Kerberos Authentication. The upshot was that you needed to have a non Kerberos site in the default zone for the purposes of crawling. The full details of this are posted over at TechNet: Configure Kerberos-authenticated sites for crawling. Now of course using non default ports is really rather silly, but it happens a lot. There was also some misinformation posted over on the To...
This is the first in a series of posts about using Kerberos with SharePoint 2010. This one is an easy introduction to using Kerberos for authentication in Classic Mode. My good buddy Ted Pattison likes to joke around with me that Kerberos is dead, thanks to the “new” world of claims based identity. But it is a joke! :) Kerberos is far from dead, and in many scenarios it is still the best choice for Authentication, if not Authorization within SharePoint 2010. For those of you who are fellow security geeks, you will know of course, that Kerberos is indeed...
Friends over on the Forefront Server Protection team are conducting research to understand what applications you would like to protect, and how you would like them protected. One of the applications they are soliciting feedback on is SharePoint. The survey shouldn't take more than 5-10 minutes, and your feedback directly impacts product decisions. Please head over to http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/forefrontsurvey to take the survey.
Quite some time ago I posted coverage of the DisableLoopbackCheck registry key and how it impacts SharePoint. It’s amazing just how often this comes up on the Interwebz. Scarily the common advice given is to turn this feature off. And that’s bad advice. In my original post I detailed why. In a nutshell: OK in test/dev, NOT OK in Production. Yesterday my buddy Bob Fox posted a follow up, DisableLoopBackCheck? Let’s do it the right way. His post details how to configure a list of names which won’t be checked. This is all good, but what if you...
Over on the rather natty looking new blog from PFE extraordinaire Todd Carter, there are details of a serious issue with SharePoint that everyone should be familiar with. Check it out. Todd's Blog | SharePoint’s Sasquatch Memory Leak
Whilst I was one of the most vocal advocates for the ability to run SharePoint Server on the client OS, it wasn’t really something I ever thought I’d want to run myself. I understood why it was of critical importance to enable this scenario, but I’m a farm guy, topologies are my bag. When the beta release came about I slapped it on a old machine just to see it working and left it at that. I also checked out the quality documentation over on MSDN which provides the convoluted steps to get it singing. Such steps are a good...
I’m somewhat aggrieved this morning, as I found a new article from TechNet entitled “Using Kerberos for SharePoint Authentication”. Now while this article is not supposed to be the be all and end all it is very depressing that still now, in 2010, such inaccurate and in some cases 100% wrong information is being put out there by the vendor. This is especially true given the work I have done in this space over the last 18 months. So what’s wrong with it? Well one of the reasons people find this area difficult is nobody seems willing to...
As I’ve previously detailed there is a significant oddity with how SharePoint 2010 Beta creates Application Pools in IIS for the hosting of Service Applications and especially the two most important services in your farm, the STS and Topology. As mentioned these application pools are named with GUIDs.
Unfortunately when creating a Web Application, SharePoint 2010 uses the SharePoint only property Display Name for the STS application. The STS application is required as part of every SharePoint 2010 Web Application and lives at /_vti_bin/sts.
As the Web Application is being provisioned SharePoint uses the display name, SecurityTokenServiceApplicationPool. This of course doesn’t exist...
We are pleased to announce a new release of the popular Application Pool Manager. This version (v3) has been produced to support SharePoint 2010. We don’t have much in the way of fancy new features in this release, but we do have some good ideas for a future release around April and are always keen on other ideas we could incorporate. The most important thing about this release is that it is targeted at SharePoint 2010 only. As such it only supports IIS7. This has allowed us to remove all of the legacy IIS6 code and the shims necessary...
Blimey! My recent post about worker processes generated a large number of follow up questions. Instead of answering all of these individually, this post will cover the details and perhaps be useful as a reference in the future. Before I get started there is one thing which perhaps is obvious, but needs to be made clear: SharePoint 2010 is a beta release. It is always possible that things change come the final RTM release. That’s the point of a beta really!:) I am going to assume the same setup characteristics from the example in the previous post. ...
I’m honoured to be one of the speakers at the upcoming SharePoint Connections 2010 event in Amsterdam, The Netherlands on the 18th and 19th January. It promises to be a great show with lots of great 2010 content and speakers. The general goal of the event is to deliver highlights from the SharePoint Conference earlier this year in Las Vegas to the European audience as well as offering significant networking opportunities. Its all going down at the RAI conference centre just outside Amsterdam city. The RAI isn’t a casino, but it is an excellent conference facility! I will presenting...
Recently a number of people have asked about the number of worker processes which are alive on a new install of SharePoint Server 2010 and the associated other processes which amongst other things increase the resource requirements (primarily RAM) for running SharePoint 2010 over SharePoint 2007. This post will explain the core changes here and what you can expect to see following the installation and farm configuration. As with SharePoint 2007, or any other .NET based web application for that matter, your implementation specifics will determine the number of and isolation and security characteristics of the processes running including...
Small things can make a big difference. But what seems small and simple often isn’t. I personally wouldn’t want to be the guy who looks after the myriad pre-requisites for SharePoint Server 2010. :) But SharePoint 2010 has a pre-requisite installer, just like SQL Server, and it’s good. In addition there are numerous other setup refinements which are a testament to a key drive of the latest version, enterprise readiness. It was promised and it’s been delivered. Sure, some improvement is always possible. The default name of a content database could use some work!:) Add that to a more...
It sure does on both my MacBook Pros and Sony VAIO. For a long time now I’ve been running a mobile rig on the MBP with VMWare. This rig allows me to demonstrate a five machine SharePoint setup at acceptable speeds with PowerPoint on the host. It’s worked really really well over the past couple years with only one problem child due to insufficient warm up time (the presenter before us overran). I was doing this using an external firewire disk for the VHDs. It wasn’t super fast, but it was workable and efficient. However since upgrading...
I’ll be in Amsterdam as one of the instructors of the SharePoint 2010 Ignite program next week. The Dutch Information Worker Group are hosting a evening event on the 4th November to coincide with Ignite. Come along and join some SharePoint Experts for a Ask the Experts panel, and probably some drinks afterwards. DIWUG - Dutch Information Worker User Group
My good buddy and fellow SharePoint Certified Master, Neil ‘The Doc’ Hodgkinson has an excellent little post over on the From the Field blog on setting up SharePoint 2010 the way you want to for the purposes of running a farm on a single machine. Check it out! Single Server Complete Install of SharePoint 2010 using local accounts - From The Field
The new Service Applications model in SharePoint 2010 presents significant improvements to the scalability of the SharePoint platform and offers tremendously exciting opportunities for developers and ISVs. This article delves into the the Service Applications model and architecture, providing developers and IT Pros essential information on the new foundation of shared services in SharePoint 2010. SharePoint 2010: Service Applications Part One: Model Overview|
SharePoint 2010 has made huge investments in enterprise readiness, from core architecture to the deployment experience, to runtime diagnostics and operational service management. Along with significant investments in tooling, and field readiness, SharePoint 2010 delivers the promise of enterprise readiness. This article highlights key feature areas and their impact on your deployments. SharePoint 2010: Enterprise Readiness
SharePoint 2010 ups the ante with it's developer tool integration, providing developers with rich development time, testing and application lifecycle support. This article provides an overview of the new features and improvements along with powerful out of the box capabilities for improving the developer experience with SharePoint 2010. SharePoint 2010: Developer Tools Overview
Last April the first European SharePoint Best Practices conference was a stunning success. Feedback from those “working” the show and attendees alike was fantastic. Not only were the technical breakout sessions first rate, featuring unique content and some of the best names in the SharePoint world, but the conference had a real community buzz.
The SharePoint 2010 Evolution Conference promises to be the premier SharePoint event outside the United States. We are back in London, 19th – 21st April. Three days of SharePoint goodness. Check out the web site as more details will be added as we ramp up over...
In just about two weeks, the SharePoint Community is descending upon Las Vegas for the 2009 SharePoint Conference. This will be the big coming out party for SharePoint Server 2010 and along with the conference itself promises to be a ton of fun. If you work with SharePoint this is a must attend event and it will be very interesting to see the continued growth of this event from it’s humble beginnings in Bellevue a few years back. I’ll be presenting a couple of sessions. Unfortunately I can’t provide the full abstracts as yet, but my schedule is as...
An article I worked on recently has just been published to MSDN. The article walks developers through the basics of getting started with building solutions on the powerful Records Management platform available in Office SharePoint Server 2007. Learn records management features and concepts, such as Records Center configuration, and records series planning and routing, and explore the Official File Web service and a sample client application to create and deploy a custom router with a routing type. (13 printed pages) Many thanks to Randall Isenhour and the MSDN crew for their help in producing...
Marc has a good post detailing his experiences when attempting to validate “performance myths” out there on the interweb. It’s good stuff. He doesn’t talk about the default behaviour in Windows Server 2008, however it’s very valuable. It’s also refreshing to see someone actually test stuff related to SharePoint in his environment, rather than just gobbling up crappy recommendations and “best practices” from the blogosphere. Full Metal Architect | Disabling PAC Validation: More than meets the eyes
Earlier today a Twitter conversation amongst some SharePoint people including my good buddies Todd Klindt and Rick Taylor took place on the subject of the infamous “loopback fix”. I promised to do a follow up post here to clear up some misconceptions about this subject with respect to SharePoint. What is the issue? Windows Server 2003 SP1 introduced a loopback security check. This feature is obviously also present in Windows Server 2008. The feature prevents access to a web application using a fully qualified domain name (FQDN) if an attempt to access it takes...
I greatly enjoyed my recent trip to Houten, Netherlands to present at the SDN event. Many thanks to the SDN crowd and those that attended my sessions and of course the SharePint event afterwards. It was a very impressive event in terms of organisation and the other great speakers and content. Here are the slide decks from my three sessions as promised. Mythbusters: debunking common SharePoint Farm Misconceptions. Kerberos Part 1: No ticket touting here, does SharePoint add another head. Kerberos Part 2: “Advanced” Scenarios and additional considerations. ...
The excellent guidance over on TechNet regarding DR farms using Log Shipping has been updated with additional details for SP2 and some excellent coverage of pre-requisites, fundamental planning considerations and performance. Essential reading for SharePoint administrators (even if you haven’t implemented Log Shipping in your solution). Configure disaster recovery across SharePoint farms by using SQL Server log shipping
You simply must read this Microsoft SharePoint Team Blog : Attention: Important Information on Service Pack 2
On a number of occasions I’ve been asked for my “cheat sheet” for setting up multiple SharePoint Web Applications using SSL and listening on Port 443. Whilst this might seem a straightforward task there are a few key things about SSL which are not well enough known, and surprise surprise, SharePoint makes life a little more difficult due to it’s total ignorance of correct addressing. This article is basically a tidied up version of the cheat sheet, along with a little bit of further explanation. This is primarily so I have something to point people to when asked about the...
Recently a bunch of people have asked me about the supportability of the approaches to providing “high availability” for SharePoint Central Administration I detailed in my article SharePoint Central Administration: High Availability, Load Balancing, Security & General Recommendations. This short update is to clarify the situation following discussions with Microsoft Premier Field Engineers on the matter. Running Central Administration on more than one server in the farm is 100% supported, and indeed a recommended best practice. Load Balancing Central Administration is 100% supported. And even if it wasn’t it wouldn’t matter as you can simply take load...
At the end of last month, James Petrosky the acting Program Manager of the SharePoint Certified Master program introduced the first SharePoint MCMs over on the Master Blog, which was reposted by Dave Pae over on the SharePoint Team Blog. Since then the MCM has come up in a number of conversations on various blogs, in their comments and elsewhere. It is apparent from these that there remains some unfortunate misconceptions about the MCM and this post is an attempt to address them. For whatever reason many assumptions about the program have been made, which are just plain wrong....
As you’ve probably noticed it’s been a little quiet here of late. Sorry about that. I’ve been pretty busy with various things. One of those things was undertaking the beta rotation (R2) of the Microsoft Certified Master for SharePoint 2007 out in Redmond WA. Many people have asked me about the experience and so this post is an attempt to distill my impressions on the program. Please note that at the time of writing I do not know if I have passed – more on that later.
[Update] Shortly after writing this post (I keep things in the hopper for a...
I spend *way* too much time talking to customers about Web Parts versus Field Controls. Especially on migration projects when folks are doing feature comparison matrix type work to define how to implement what they used to have in other products before moving into the 2000s with SharePoint. My good buddy, AC has just announced the availability of his excellent white paper on the topic – hopefully this will help reduce the time suck on this important, but fundamental topic. It’s on MSDN, but IT Pros also absolutely must know this stuff. ***NOW AVAILABLE*** MSDN: Understanding Field Controls...
During the MVP Summit in Seattle a couple weeks back down I sat down with Rob Foster and Nick Swan for an interview on the SharePoint Pod Show. I waffled about various topics, some of which you may find interesting. Challenges in Enterprise SharePoint Deployments-Episode 20
I’m often asked for book recommendations. One of the good and bad things about the popularity of SharePoint 2007 is there are now gazillions of titles to choose from. Back in the day you’d struggle to find any SharePoint material on the shelves and in 2001 there was only one decent book at all. Today it’s a different story. Trouble is with quantity comes an inevitable decrease in quality. Of late however there has been a number of excellent books published. I’m not saying these are the ones you should get, but rather that the ones listed below are ones...
If you have been in any of my SharePoint admin classes or worked with me on deployments you will be familiar with one of my favorite topics, the ‘hidden cost’ of SharePoint. I’m not talking about scary topics like ‘governance’, ‘best practices’, culture change, end user training, or Enterprise CALs, but rather all the other things you absolutely must have when operating SharePoint in the enterprise. It’s long overdue that I post a summary here for all those who want the key takeaway information. This is not a criticism of the SharePoint stack. None of these things are really...
Next month, April 6th thru 8th, the SharePoint Best Practices Conference comes to Europe. London is the place to be, specifically the QEII Conference Center. You can register for the event here. I’ve had the privilege to present at the first event in Washington DC, and more recently the second in San Diego,CA. This conference is a great show with superb speakers and the low down dirty what you need to know to be successful with SharePoint. No fluff. No marketing. Find out more about the agenda and speakers at http://www.sharepointbestpractices.co.uk. This time around we have a great...
SharePoint Joel has some good points over on his recent post regarding the waste of space that most documents are. Certainly I can agree with this – I’ve seen and produced enough of these things over the years – a few unfortunate souls have even read the ones with my name on the front! I guess apologies are in order to you all at this point :)
However, such a generalization is extremely dangerous albeit it a good controversy for debate. (Darn, now I’m humming that guitar lick).
The bottom line here is it depends upon the content. All this social computing...
Thanks to all who attended my sessions at the Best Practices SharePoint Conference earlier this month in San Diego. As promised, here are the presentations from these sessions. Apologies for the delay in posting these – I have been under the weather since returning from the US. A quick note on the Kerberos Config Wizard, which as I mentioned during the session, is unfortunately delayed due to legal issues. This is still the case and I am trying to progress as quickly as possible. Stay tuned for the release. DEV435: Go Live! Launching your MOSS...
Pej has done the deed and announced this over on the SharePoint Team Blog: PerformancePoint scorecarding and dashboarding capabilities will now become part of SharePoint Enterprise CAL and available to customers who are on SharePoint SA. This means that customers who want to deploy PerformancePoint can do so today at no additional cost. Microsoft SharePoint Team Blog : Microsoft Business Intelligence strategy update and SharePoint
If you are making use of the very cool Business Data Catalog in MOSS Enterprise you are doubtless aware that the hands down best tool to accelerate your projects is BDC Meta Man from Lightning Tools. They’ve been busy beavering away on a new tool which addresses a key problem in many projects which utilize the BDC, the requirement to be able to access the Shared Services Administration Web Site in order to fiddle about with Application Definitions and so forth. Whilst it is possible to delegate permissions to the SSP Admin site, it isn’t anywhere near granular enough,...
As previously detailed we have been busy working on a public (version 2) release of the SharePoint Kerberos Configuration Utility which has been used successfully on a number of customer engagements. We are aiming for a release the first week in February at the SharePoint Best Practices Conference. Configuring a SharePoint Farm for Kerberos is very easy however there are a large number of variables which depend upon the farm characteristics and more importantly the business requirements. In addition there is a staggering amount of misinformation (such as needing delegation for simple authentication scenarios!!!) out there on blogs and...
Thanks to all those who attended yesterday’s webcast. A few folk asked about the download, which is now available at: https://www.livemeeting.com/cc/mseventsbmo/view?id=1032396926&role=attend&pw=2E178E33 Enjoy! Some of the questions during the webcast related to disconnected deployment and also additional scenarios which cannot be achieved by using the Central Administration UI alone. I also promised to post some additional resources, here they are! We may also cover these in a future webcast: How to: Customize Deployment for Disconnected Scenarios Walk through of creating and running a job in order to save the CABs to...
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...
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.
...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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. Technorati Tags: sharepoint,sharepoint farms
A while back I posted my popular article series, Triple Boot MacBook Pro, which described the steps necessary to configure a three-way system running Mac OS, Windows Vista x64 and Windows Server 2008 x64.
At the time it was unfortunately not possible make use of VMWare Fusion’s killer feature – running a VM directly from the Boot Camp partition (no VHDs). This was due to a couple of “issues”, which have thankfully now been addressed by VMWare.
This article explains the issues and details the remaining tweaks necessary to run the Vista partition under VMWare Fusion for a triple boot system.
It took a while but the Using scripts to automate SharePoint Server 2007 installation guidance has finally been published. Chris Smith details the release over on ToTheSharePoint. The best thing about this release are the examples and sample code, however I caution you to test appropriately and don’t be fooled into believing the premise that it’s just better. That my friends, isn’t true. Unfortunately the vendor has a nasty habit of arrogantly saying “you should be doing it like this… [link]” when they took over 18 months to produce and publish the material when others have been doing...
Finally got around to uploading an update to my fixes article. Apologies for the delay, my excuse is my hosting “provider”, and I’m sticking to it :) SharePoint 2007 Post SP1 Hotfixes
Those crazy kids at Typemock have announced Isolator for sharepoint: It is almost the same as Typemock Isolator, but will only work on APIs that are directly connected with sharepoint’s API. That means that if you only need to test sharepoint stuff, you can get a powerful product, for a much cheaper price than the full Isolator (you can always upgrade later if you need to isolate more APIs). Info for masses, how to get free licence: Typemock are offering their new product for unit testing SharePoint...
We are pleased to be back again at the Scottish Parliament for another evening of SharePoint at 6.30pm, November 27th. Many thanks to Stephen Hynds for facilitating the event.
If you want to come along, please go here and register your name, otherwise the security peeps won’t let you in the building, this is after all the seat of the Scottish Government. There will doubtless be a few sherberts following the event.
Spencer Harbar SharePoint MVP - MythBusters – debunking common SharePoint Farm Misconceptions
This interactive, whiteboard session will dive into common SharePoint Farm Myths and discuss common misconceptions around Global Deployments, Farm...
During TechEd ITForum a couple weeks ago, Microsoft announced the Microsoft Certified Master (MCM) for Office SharePoint Server 2007 and the Microsoft Certified Architect (MCA) for Office SharePoint Server 2007.
Pretty quickly a micro-debate started on this and a few people posted their thoughts on blogs. I promised at the time to do a post that detailed out the salient points, which unfortunately have been missed thus far. There has also been a lot of complaints regarding the associated cost. So here goes.
Forget about the SharePoint Technical Specialist Exams
Firstly, there is no relationship between the current four MSTS exams for SharePoint,...
Server Explorer for SharePoint viewing Lists and other artifacts in SharePoint directly inside of Visual Studio Windows SharePoint Services Project (WSP file) Import to create a new solution Added a new web part project item and showed the Visual web part designer which loads a user control as a web part for SharePoint Showed adding an event receiver for...
Joel has just posted a killer entry on his blog:
Best Practices for Enterprise User Scalability in SharePoint
Best Practices for Overcoming the 64K ACL, Security Principal Limits, and Future of Identity Management
If you are a SharePoint "Architect", or at least belive you are :) you must read this material. Don't believe the hype or waffle about ACL limits, DIP sizes or any other rambling of the sort - head over right now to Joel's blog and get the real skinny.
I've had a bunch of requests to start talking more about IIS7 development and whilst I've covered some examples of this previously in my SharePoint and Windows 2008 presentations I thought I'd start by providing a very simple example from APM. This is also to answer (bizarrely) the same question from two readers of this blog. This example shows how to retrieve a list of Application Pools on the box. You'd think this would be straightforward and efficient right? and easy to do in managed code without any nastiness? right? :) wrong. On IIS6 this is what you need...
Yesterday during the opening PDC keynote I did the final release build of APM v2 and posted it for download. Unfortunately due to a combination of sucky wireless and power "issues" I have only now got around to posting an announcement here.
Since the initial release of APM it's grown many arms and legs and it has been amazingly popular. By version 1.2 the code had become pretty disgusting and hard to maintain (even for something which does very little). Therefore this release is a complete from the ground re-write. It's actually been ready for quite a while but I was...
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...
For along time there's been a significant gap in the perf and cap planning guides around the InfoPath Forms Services features of MOSS. I'm very pleased to see this gap now filled with the below recent publication. Essential for those architect-ing MOSS Enterprise deployments: This performance and capacity planning scenario incorporates a single Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 farm that is running InfoPath Forms Services Estimate performance and capacity requirements for InfoPath Forms Services environments (Office SharePoint Server)
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! SharePoint 2007 Post SP1 Hotfixes
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...
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....
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....
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 Infrastructure Updates for WSS 3.0 and MOSS 2007 are now available. I've also updated my Post SP1 Hotfixes article.
Key updates for Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 include:
Platform performance improvements and fixes.
Several backup and restore fixes.
Several core Workflow fixes.
Key updates for SharePoint Server 2007 include:
New Search features such as federated search and a unified search administration dashboard.
Several core fixes to Search to improve performance and scale.
Platform performance improvements and fixes....
[UPDATE] Don't be deploying these fixes, go get the Infrastructure Updates instead (which include these fixes).
Finally the KB articles detailing the Content Migration and Content Deployment fixes are live on support.microsoft.com. I've also update my Post SP1 Hotfixes article with these links.
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx/kb/952698 (WSS)
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/952704 (MOSS)
One of the freakiest things about running on an excellent MacBook Pro is the keyboard layout. Keys in the wrong place and a few missing ones like #, PrtScr and AltGr. Once you get used to it it's all good however. There's combinations and so forth to get at things you need. The trouble is just as you've gotten used to it, you fire up those development virtual machines and they don't know squat about the Apple keyboard. This is because the custom Input mapping installed as part of the Boot Camp package isn't installed on the VM. Arse! ...
You know the score - you've a couple of indispensable applications which refuse to install on your operating system of choice because the idjut vendor decided it would be a good idea to bake into the installer some sort of version check. This is usually when you're trying to use a 64 bit operating system or wish to install something on a server OS. I have a couple examples - Sony's Ereader is a must have for me, but the installer doesn't like 64 bit. Others include Live Messenger and LifeCam which refuse to install on Windows Server. It...
Thanks to all who attended the Edinburgh SUGUK meeting last week for a great event. A big shout out to Steven Hynds and crew for facilitating the venue. The slide deck for my talk can be found here. Hope to see you again soon (probably towards the back of August) for more SUGUK events north of the border!
Just a quick reminder, if you are planning on attending the SUGUK Meeting at the Parliament building in Edinburgh this Thursday, please sign up over at the SUGUK Forms.
As you may have noticed, I've been getting a bit carried away with my shiny MacBook Pro of late. I have this bad boy set up to triple boot Mac OS, Vista x64 and Windows Server 2008 x64. The idea here is to have a small Win2k8 partition running MOSS for demos/presentations (and the odd bit of coding) running on the metal rather than in a VM. The latest Boot Camp drivers enable this goodness, they all work flawlessly. All that is, apart from the Bluetooth stack. This is a problem because I use the excellent Microsoft Wireless Notebook...
Check it: This page provides resources for IT pros to help you plan and implement a Web Content Management (WCM) solution using Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007. Web Content Management Resource Center for Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007
For a while now Microsoft have been offering online hotfix requests which minimise the need to call CSS and raise an incident to get your hands on a hotfix. However the link to the request form was hidden in the "hotfix information" section of the KB and often missed by customers. Today support.microsoft.com have improved things significantly with the following graphic at the very top of each KB article for which a download is available: This takes you to an improved hotfix request form allowing you to select language, OS etc and then send a...
Late Friday afternoon/evening I had an interesting call with a customer who was experiencing severe perceived poor performance on their SharePoint 2007 WCM application. The problem was resolved simply by implementing OOTB functionality - namely Caching, in particular the disk-based caching, and they agreed it was appropriate to post here.
Basically the site is a regular Publishing site albeit used for the most part internally. The site does feature however a significant amount of "binary content" which is linked to from the pages. It had been running fine for quite a while, but not in volume. They hadn't planned for or...
This is a list of the post Service Pack 1 hotfix packages for SharePoint 2007, primarily for my own reference. This is not a list of fixes, but rather the update packages.
[[UPDATE]] Updated and moved to: www.harbar.net/articles/postsp1.aspx.
Consistently and by a considerable margin, the most popular search terms that lead people to this site are around MOSS Licensing and the For Internet Sites (MOSS FIS) edition. This is also a hot topic in customer engagements, in classrroms, at conferences such as TechEd and in general conversations about using SharePoint 2007 for Internet sites. This is not all that surprising given the amount of misinformation out there. In addition Microsoft obfuscate the topic with many layers of misdirection. I know for a fact that this isn't deliberate on the part of the vendor, but one could be forgiven...
Finally managed to finish up a new version of the Application Pool Recycle Utility for SharePoint Developers! This release features many enhancements and a couple new features based on feedback. You can download the new release and view more information here. [Update 26/05/2008] Please note this is the last major release of the original codebase. Whilst minor fixes will continue to be made, future major releases will target Windows Server 2008 only.
Here's an *unsupported* way to get WSS SP1 up and running on Vista. Like I say *unsupported*!!! How to install Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 SP1 on Vista x64/x86 - The Bamboo Team Blog
[UPDATE] Don't be deploying these fixes, go get the Infrastructure Updates instead (which include these fixes).
Whilst assisting customers recently who are experiencing issues with Content Deployment (CD) in MOSS 2007, it appears CSS now has a huge QFE that addresses a ton of known issues (60+) specific to (CD). For now it looks like you can only get it via Microsoft Customer Support Services (CSS). Like other hotfixes, it's likely this QFE pack will be included in a future MOSS update roll up but there are no details or confirmation on this at present.
The QFE pack helps address some...
We are pleased to announce the first SUGUK meeting in Edinburgh. The event will take place at the stunning Scottish Parliament (no snide remarks about using it for something useful please!) on Thursday June 19th. A special shout out to Stephen Hynds for organising the venue. If you get there early you'll be able to take a wee tour. The event will include two sessions by Steve Smith and myself: MOSS 2007 on Windows Server 2008 - Spencer Harbar Learn how to leverage the...
For those with the pre-Penryn MacBook Pros running Vista x64 you will no doubt be bloomin' annoyed by the conflict issue between the wireless driver and the sound card which results in white noise and annoying clicks and pops when using a WLAN connection. At last a complete fix for this is now available - via - wait for it - Windows Update! Now you could solve this previously for hunting down Atheros drivers from dodgy laptop forum type sites - but that's helva risky. This way is much better!
[UPDATE] Please note that SharePoint 2010 does not support Kernel Mode Authentication, and disables this by default when Web Applications are created. Please see this post for more details.
As I demonstrated during the Kerberos session at the Manchester SUGUK meeting last month, there is an extra step required to enable Kerberos Authentication for SharePoint when using Windows Server 2008.
One of the security changes in IIS 7.0 is that Windows Authentication is performed by default in the kernel. This is a good thing! It eases the configuration required for Kerberos and improves performance significantly.
Because HTTP.sys is handling the authentication, it is...
Wondered what happened to app center?
Want to sync your IIS (and remain supported) Want that sync to include SSL Certs? GAC? Regkeys? DSNs? - well apart from the last two (for which you should be shot) :)
Check out the Web Deployment Tool which has reached Beta 1 and for which there is a Go Live licence.
One of the great things about my MacBook Pro (or any computer running the excellent Mac OS X for that matter) is that pretty much everything just works and for the most part everything you need is included in Mac OS. Things have certainly changed since my early days in this "industry" cramming all manner of dodgy third party applets into the system folder!
There are however a small number of essential utilities I wouldn't wish to be without when I am on the turtle-neck side of my MacBook Pro.
Battery Health Monitor
This bad boy I hopefully won't use much, but checks...
Running Mac OS X, Windows Vista x64 and Windows Server 2008 x64 on a MacBook Pro.
This article series details a process for installing Mac OS X, Windows Vista x64 and Windows Server 2008 x64 on a MacBook Pro with complete driver support. While it is not the only way to setup such a system, this approach minimises the configuration necessary and avoids shell commands, and the need for third party boot loader utilities.
The scenario this approach is intended to address is as follows:
Primary OS for day to day use – Windows Vista Ultimate x64 Service Pack...
I note that Vista 64 bit drivers and BootCamp 2.1 appear on the latest MacBook Pro install disk one and the release to web a couple days ago (also via Apple Software Update). This is great news!!!. This avoids the somewhat troublesome approach using the MacPro drivers and a couple of workarounds. In addition the annoying soundcard/wireless conflict which results in very annoying white noise on Vista has gone! W00t!
These newer MacBook Pros of course have multitouch (bah humbug - although zoom is pretty cool) and re-arranged function keys.
It's not all good news though as the whopping 170Mb update for...
Due to popular demand, SUGUK and the Manchester .NET User group are hosting Andrew Woodward and I with a couple of popular SharePoint sessions: An introduction to the Silverlight blueprint for SharePoint During the first part of the event Andrew will Walk us through configuring SharePoint and the creation of your first Silverlight application followed by a Q&A session on what this means for you and some of the challenges you are likely to face introducing Silverlight into your SharePoint applications. Kerberos...
"Sneaked out" on to the 'net over on Mike Watson's blog - the latest and greatest version of the SharePoint DB Mirroring White paper has must read information on topology support and SQL connection aliasing (intra-farm failover). Async isn't yet included, but nethertheless, this is an essential read. SharePoint Hosting and Development : The Newest Version of the Database Mirroring Whitepaper for SharePoint has been released
A month or so ago I joined what has become somewhat of a mini-trend amongst SharePoint types, and bought a MacBook Pro. It's not like us SharePoint heads are special (well, we are, but not because of this) and there were many others before us of course.
I had been considering a new laptop for quite a while and since the switch to proper hardware and the release of BootCamp, Apples are now a more than viable option for running Windows. The primary purpose of this machine is to run Vista (obviously), and the specs available are extremely competitive.
Now having said...
I'll be Seattle next week for the second US SharePoint Conference. This year it's a lot bigger (hence the move to Seattle) and will be a lot of fun. I'm sure there'll also be plenty of evening "entertainment" including the SharePint by Night event. Mine's a Guinness. I'm also on the hunt for a decent Indian restaurant somewhere downtown-ish, if you have any recommendations let me know (but it has to be decent, you dig?).
Many thanks to all those who attended the SUGUK meeting in London on Wednesday evening. Another excellent SUGUK event thanks to the great work by Nick Swan and Steve Smith. It's fantastic to see a consistently high turn out and this is a great sign that SharePoint continues on it's rightful path to world domination.
Ben Robb's talk on managing deployment was superb and must see material for those working on medium and large scale development projects.
My talk wasn't as good - but it was on a boring infrastructure topic - so I have an excuse (kind of!). Apologies for overrunning...
For those planning on attending my Tech Ed session, Building High Performance .com Sites on Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007, it has been rescheduled for 13.30 on Wednesday, Nov. 7th. I will also be available at the ATE booths on Wednesday and Thursday. If you want to catch up regarding WCM, or any other MOSS topics drop me a line via this site.
There's been a lot of posts recently about "SharePoint as a Development Platform". These posts have generated considerable feedback and the whole area is certainly an interesting conversation. Of course, the signal to noise ratio has been pretty low with the usual emotional blather and plenty of "SharePoint just sucks".
However irritating and inane many snippets are it is a good thing that the volume is being turned up on this particular discussion. The more noise, the more likely the vendor are to listen. Sad, but true nevertheless. Some of the noise is entertaining and after all these things can be...
Joel Oleson is over at RunAs Radio talking sense about SharePoint. RunAs Radio
http://geekswithblogs.net/coredump/archive/2007/09/26/115656.aspx Intellisense for PowerShell. Wubba!
Ted Pattison is blogging again. You may remember Ted - simply the man in the old world of VB COM, MTS, COM+ distributed app and just plain sense application development (I'm pretty sure he never touched VB6's WebClasses :)). He wrote books that clearly articulated MTS - even to VB types :) He is really an exceptionally articulate man. Ted was somewhat of a role model if you like WRT his training and writing. Not only were his books on the money technically - he could actually write - compelling - with a strong story to tell - and with proper English...
Right, so I really am not turning my blog into a pimp vehicle for my friends stuff....
But (!)...
If you haven't seen this yet - you absolutely must check it out.
http://www.andrewconnell.com/blog/archive/2007/08/21/6095.aspx
AC is a real super smart cookie - he's not just a smart developer - he *knows* how to articulate problems, tradeoffs, compromises and he knows how to use his keyboard for maximum effect.
If you know me, or have worked with/for me you know I don't tolerate lame developers, but when I come across a decent one I will make that very clear. After 15 years in the business I haven't...
I decided to release a minor update to the popular Application Pool Recycle Utility based on a number of requests to display the Process ID. It now does this using a tool tip via WMI.Click here to get the latest version. There were a number of new features originally planned for this release, such as Warm Up associations and a CLI with arguments for use in Post Build tasks. However based on some initial work and a frustration with the management APIs, I've decided to re-consider the future development of the tool. In a nutshell the multitude...
Mike Volodarsky - "da man" when it comes to proper, big ass, IIS has dusted off his code skills once again to bring us a killer tool for custom config in IIS7. Go get it to see how it should be done. Mike Volodarsky's ServerSide : IISSCHEMA.EXE - A tool to register IIS7 configuration sections
Steve Smith over at Combined Knowledge has posted a new version of his excellent Email Enabled Lists white paper, this time for Exchange Server 2007. Go check it out.
http://www.combined-knowledge.com/Downloads%202007.htm
As previously discussed, it is possible to configure your SharePoint Farm to abide by the principle of least privilege. However there are some additional steps required if you have deployed any of the SharePoint Server 2007 hotfix packages dated later than April 12th 2007.
For the most part, the SharePoint Configuration Wizard (SCW) and Central Administration take care of assigning the necessary rights and group memberships. There are two exceptions with the RTM bits:
IWAMRegService Activation (aka DCOM 10016 issue)
%windir%/tasks
Unfortunately, the hotfix packages add another manual configuration task. Whilst it is a...
Yeah, I know what you're thinking, 'it's that Harbar again, ranting uncontrollably about some admin crap I don't care about'. Well that might well be the case, but the thing is you should care. Especially if you are building solutions based upon the Web Content Management (WCM) features of Office SharePoint Server 2007. See the important bit is the word 'solutions' - that means the entire thing, not just the funky recursive wrapped wrapper you got for dealing with '/pages/', your reflection bling and email address capture widget. One of the WCM features is that of Content Deployment. Content...
Easily the most irritating element of mis-configuration in a SharePoint 2007 farm is the assignment of local admin privileges (for each box in the farm) to the account used for connections to the configuration database and as the identity of the application pool hosting Central Administration (commonly referred to as the 'farm account'. THIS IS NOT A REQUIREMENT!! THIS IS NOT A REQUIREMENT!! Your farm account can be a regular domain user, no special requirements at all. The SharePoint Configuration Wizard will assign ALL the required privileges automatically (which the exception of DCOM activation as detailed here, and the issue with %windir%\Tasks). So...
Virtual Server 2005 R2 SP1 is now available for free download in both 32bit and 64bit versions. New features include: PXE boot support for guest OSes A command line tool for mounting VHDs as virtual drives on other OSes Support for Volume Shadow Copy snapshots as a backup mechanism Virtual Server can run more than 64 guest OSes on x64 platforms 128GB is now the default size for expanding disks But, still no 64 bit guest support which will be available in Longhorn Server Virtualisation codename Viridian.
It's that time already - another June - (yet) another Tech Ed. If you are attending and want to hook up regarding WCM or any other Office SharePoint Server topics, you will likely find me loitering around the Technical Learning Center and at the WCM sessions. Feel free to email me if you have a busy schedule and require more formality! If you are building WCM solutions be sure to attend the Birds of a Feather chaperoned by Andrew Connell and myself. I've just arrived at my hotel - which has a bizarre "hollywood" theme - go figure. Looking forward...
Over on the SharePoint Team Blog, Lawrence has announced the availability of the WSS 3.0 for Hosters Solution Kit. Go check it out!
Blimey! I hacked out a little utility a week or so back and surprisingly it's turned out to be rather popular. According to my web trends, there's been over 600 downloads of the thing, now obviously I have no idea how many people immediately deleted it, but that's a pretty amazing number. Four individuals have shown significant interest and requested tweaks or new capabilities directly. In addition, I noticed a fundamental flaw in the the original "design" whereby the app pools were only enumerated on start-up. This was obviously rubbish - should you delete or create app pools either with inetmgr or SharePoint Central...
Due to popular demand (well AC anyways - that's popular in my book) I've updated my Application Pool Widget to include: IIS ResetPost Event "Warm Ups"Event Notifications These were pretty simple to implement, but I couldn't figure out an easy/quick way to make it work from a keyboard shortcut, if anyone knows how to do this (without using a third party control) please leave me a comment. Get it from here: Application Pool Recycle Utility for SharePoint Developers.
System Center Operations Manager 2007 offers many new and significantly enhanced features for providing operational service management of your SharePoint farms. Of note are the vastly improved deployment, reporting enhancements and PowerShell integration. In addition Audit Collection Services has finally shipped in this release after nearly three years of promises. While Operations Manager 2007 is an essential part of your SharePoint infrastructure, it doesn't ship with Management Packs for SharePoint 2007 and this version also introduces a new Management Pack file format. This means the Management Packs for SharePoint 2007 (released in January) are not compatible and require conversion to the...
[Update 9th April 2007] A new build with new features is available at Application Pool Recycle Utility for SharePoint Developers. If you are doing any substantial SharePoint development, chances are you are using iisapp.vbs to recycle your application pools. This script, introduced with W2K3 SP1, does a bunch of useful stuff and you've probably got a shortcut to it configured with the name of your app pool. If you don't know about this, recycling the app pool, rather than doing an IISRESET is much quicker and often times is all you need. I'm not saying you don't sometimes...
So, at the weekend I posted about shell additions and wot not, and I made a mess of it by calling Start++ "slow and crappy". It isn't. It's not much of an excuse, but I was actually talking about Expose and got the names mixed up - Expose is a dodgy shell addon that mimicks some Macism or other. It's slow and crappy cos it uses a ton of resources and doesn't do anything useful especially if you have a decent microsoft mouse. which gives you non sucky tiled windows in Vista, when you click the scroll wheel. So just...
The SharePoint Configuration Wizard (and Central Admin) does a decent job of ensuring the neccessary privileges are applied to various users and resources, but one slipped through the 'net. You know the one - it's that pesky DCOM 10016 which will fill up your System Log with noise everytime your application pool spins up. Now it just so happens that the error doesn't actually matter a stuff and won't break anything, other than your sysadmin's patience and respect for SharePoint! It's especially annoying if you are running Operations Manager or a Managed Security Auditing system which will bleet when this...
Licensing for Office SharePoint Server is widely seen as pretty confusing, especially when figuring the "for Internet Sites" edition into the equation. Now in general these things are best left to your Microsoft Account Manager or a Licensing Specialist - top tip - don't trust the "specialist" at the reseller if you are on a volume licence deal!!
Anyways - the links that Cornelius (a SharePoint MVP) recently posted are considered the authorative info, check these before those random "let me explain MOSS licensing" posts you may find (like this one :)):
http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepointserver/FX101865111033.aspx
http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepointserver/FX102176831033.aspx (US List Prices)
http://office.microsoft.com/search/redir.aspx?AssetID=XT102011901033&CTT=5&Origin=HA1019780331033 (an XLS which is handy)
But wait,...
SharePoint developer extraordinaire, Andrew Connell is working on a monster custom command for SharePoint's STSADM utility. I've been beavering away trying to input something useful into AC's test phase and I am lost for words to describe it's uber-functionality. I have no idea how he'll finally decide on a name. If you are working with SharePoint you need this command, so head on over to his blog and keep your eyes peeled for his next post.
Last month I posted an argument for a Developer Edition of Office SharePoint Server. By no means was this a wholly original or new idea, but some of the benefits of such a product were being poorly articulated and it needed some wider exposure. Anyways, the original post generated some good discussion both here and elsewhere and the general consensus is that people want it. Over the last few days the post has been re-invigorated, and Andrew Woodward commented about an associated topic, the lack of SDL approaches to SharePoint development in general. Andrew's point on testing and continuous integration actually...
It's here!!!
Get it at
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=95ac1610-c232-4644-b828-c55eec605d55&DisplayLang=en
Troy Starr has started his series on Alternate Access Mappings. This is a must read, so go check it out.
Hi folks, this is Troy Starr again from the Windows SharePoint Services Test team. Today I'd like to talk about one of the most powerful, but often one of the least understood, features in Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007. That feature is called Alternate Access Mappings. Around here, we just call it "AAM" for short.
Source:
http://blogs.msdn.com/sharepoint/archive/2007/03/06/what-every-sharepoint-administrator-needs-to-know-about-alternate-access-mappings-part-1.aspx
It's finally done and available at:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=90e2942d-3ad1-4873-a2ee-4acc0aace5b6&displaylang=en&tm
Love it! Frank just posted the common sense view on ReadyBoost and Virtual Machines with a nice graphic demonstrating the, as we say here, 'bleedin' obvious' :) Of course the problem with "common sense" is that it's stated far too infrequently and therefore is not 'common' enough. Lot's of people have blogged about using ReadyBoost to "speed up" thier VM expierence. Yeah right!! It's of no help to ya whatsoever (when in the VM). Get yourself a nice fast hard disk and some real memory, oh and a few more cores or procs :) A trip back to the reality of...
No more moaning regarding claims aware SharePoint please. What you need to know is right here.
Configure Web SSO authentication by using ADFS (Office SharePoint Server).
http://technet2.microsoft.com/Office/en-us/library/61799f9a-da01-4c11-b930-52e5114324451033.mspx?mfr=true
Oh and by the way, if you were considing a third party "SSO" solution for SharePoint.... ahh, no perhaps this is not the place for such a sentiment... :)
Wubba! My office is now certified XP free!
I am very happy... Since Vista hit late last year it's been a somewhat rocky road to becoming free of XP. First up the various drivers for the gadgets on Sony laptops (I have three) were very late and only became possible last week. Even now the european site doesn't have them based on model number etc. It's quite a challenge to get these all playing nice - requiring obtaining them for other models and such. Anyways these are all now sorted. Even the HDD protection util which is very troublesome.
The second problem...
It is a common misconception both among customers and those in the (ahem) consulting business that SharePoint Technologies can be deployed as a wholesale replacement for traditional file server based shares within an organization.
Whilst moving to the new world of work can indeed dramatically reduce the amount of data stored (and used) in this manner (think personal drive or the common general dumping ground for all manner of tat) this perception is very dangerous and should be debunked at the earliest possible opportunity to save you from a world of hurt.
So are SharePoint Technologies a suitable replacement for your existing File Shares?...
Anyone responsible for operating mid to large scale hosting environments based upon the Microsoft platform absolutely must check out this entry over on the MS.com Ops blog:
Tell me how I’m measured…and I’ll behave accordingly
"Without clear measures individual groups and/or individuals will decide for themselves what measures they use for making decisions as well as to gauge their success…leading to a disjointed organization and misaligned customer relationships. For example, your Operations group may measure an application’s availability on a 24/7 clock while the customer owning the application really only cares about the application’s availability during discrete time windows throughout the day....
Joel Oleson has a great entry on Global & Multi Farm deployments of SharePoint. He explains in simple terms the issues and in particular the details on SSPs over the WAN (a BIG customer issue) are essential to anyone looking at enterprise deployment planning of the 2007 products.
http://blogs.msdn.com/joelo/archive/2006/12/13/global-multi-farm-deployments.aspx
Planning for Capacity Boundaries, Estimating Performance & Capacity Requirements, Additional Factors, and Tools
WSS: http://technet2.microsoft.com/WindowsServer/en/library/0e13e879-0156-4e9f-b6d5-abddcf326d211033.mspx?mfr=true
MOSS: http://technet2.microsoft.com/Office/en-us/library/eb2493e8-e498-462a-ab5d-1b779529dc471033.mspx?mfr=true
It is very common for SharePoint developers to bounce IIS using the ubiquitous IISRESET command. However it is much quicker and more efficient to recycle the Application Pool hosting the application you are working on.
Chris Adams has posted a a .js script to do this.
Link to Livin life... : Recycling Application Pools using WMI in IIS 6.0
Of course some times, the whole of IIS needs bounced, :) but at least this make it less often.